The Evitable

Movie Quiz Who Do You Like As the Killer?

2011-05-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

{Match the line quoted to the movie it's from. (The clips are clues, though the passages don't include these quotes.) Lines 12, 15 and 18 are subtitled translations, from the German and twice from the French, respectively. Line 11 is a dialogue subtitle from a silent film. Post your guesses in the comment thread below, in fact feel free to post comments on any of the live or archived film discussions on this site.)

1.“The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

2.“There’s a high speed pursuit, we got a shooting and then this execution type deal.”

3.“I’m the only thing that stands between you and darkness and night, son. The other side of me is chaos.”

4. “There’s always room at the top for brains, money or a good pair of titties.”

5. “Shoot then, if it pleasures you.”

6. “A pity he exists.”

7. “So these faked suicides of yours are for your mother’s benefit?”
“No. . . . I would not say benefit.”

8. “Kit’s the most trigger happy person I ever met.”

9. “And what magazines sell best?”

“The ones with ladies on the front covers and no front covers on the ladies.”

10. “Try to break into my house—I ought to blow you away. I got to tell you the truth—the only reason I don’t is ‘cause someone might hear me.”

11. “Can you lend me a rope so I can swing a fellow out where I can get a better shot at him?”

12. “What are they saying?”

“Meat, meat, fresh meat, coming up the river.”

13. “Mister Hickok, that man’s really dead.”

“Got him through the lungs and heart both.”

14. “Success to crime.”

15. “So now white people wait ‘til they’re dead to talk to black folks? Well it’s too late!”

16. “Hospital hallucination scene, take two.”

17. “Mister President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I am saying ten to twenty million dead, tops. Depending on the breaks.”

18. “If we don’t eat. . . we won’t die.”

19. “There’s nothing urgent here. Redundant.”

20. “All right then, who do you like as the killer?”

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus/Nine: "The Eye Altering Alters All"

2011-02-13T08:19:00.000-08:00

This week's review on The Moving Picture Writes is

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus/Nine

Also Up this week on About Us ("The Eye Altering Alters All" is a clip from

Enchanted April

(These will change once a week, as will the reviews.)

The Ruling Class/The Eye Altering Alters All

2011-02-05T09:15:00.001-08:00

New this week at The Moving Picture Writes
http://themovingpicturewrites.com/index.php?stn=96433&pageno=17

I don't often feel huge enthusiasm for the film that wins best picture at the Oscars.They seem to me mostly such timid and compromised choices.

I'm rarely quite so pissed at them as I was in 1972, when I thought it scandolous that The Ruling Class didn't sweep every major category.

Best adapted screenplay? There certainly wasn't one that year--few any year--so brilliant and incisive as Peter Barnes' adaptation of his own stage play--just as there've been few plays in English that come close to the wit intelligence emotional-philosophical range of The Ruling Class--and five at least of those that did were written by Peter Barnes.

(A couple were even written by Shakespeare.)

Best lead actress? Coral Browne, hands down. Lead actor? Peter O'Toole. Supporting actress? Carolyn Seymour. Supporting actor--Alastair Sim and Arthur Lowe would have to duke that one out.

(Nigel Greene as the Electric Messiah, Harry Andrews as the 13th Earl and Graham Crowden as the Master in Lunacy were each brilliant in their turn, but in a single scene only. And while you could also make a case for William Merwin as Uncle Charles, Michael Bryant as Dr. Herder and James Villiers as Dinsdale, even if all five best support actor noms had come from the same film, which would be somewhat unusual, only one could win.)

Direction? Editing? Soundtrack? Cinematrography? Set design, costume design?

Nothing else that year came anywhere near The Ruling Class in any of these categories and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. But I was angry at a larger injustice than an Academy snub: the loss to a wide popular audience of a genuinely great popular classic.

Also new this week, in the Video thread of About Us ("The Eye Altering Alters All"

About Us/Little Big Man

2011-01-28T03:45:00.000-08:00

I wondered whether I should let people know I've added a new feature to About Us on The Moving Picture Writes or let them gradually discover for themselves the film clip I've added below the bio (which will change roughly once a week. Decided I'd compromise and limit my disclosure to facebook and my blog.
http://www.themovingpicturewri...tes.com/?stn=96433&pageno=4

While I'm at it, since I didn't post this week's new page yet:

http://www.themovingpicturewrites.com/?stn=96433&pageno=6

Robert Boyle

2011-01-18T03:59:00.000-08:00

I only became aware of Robert Boyle--one of those names that tends to disappear in the scroll of final credits however many films of note he might be associated with--when I was looking for YouTube clips to link to for a Linnet's Wings essay, Death House Comedy.

I particularly wanted a clip for Winter Kills, which I continue to think one of the finest and most underrated movies in the history of cinema (for reasons I'll go into in another piece at a later date).

Sorting the possibilities I discovered this gem, the perfect quick introduction--a conversation, with illustrative clips, between production designer (or art director--the titles are interchangeable) Robert Boyle and screenwriter/director William Richert:

Read on here:

Robert Boyle

The Moving Picture Writes

2011-01-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

With this column I inaugurate a movie/tv appreciation website. Under the above title I'll be offering, from time to time, memoirs of my encounters over the years with film and, increasingly, tv.

Under other headings I'll be doing film reviews, background studies, film commentary reviews (the first of these for The Ruling Class, since I planned when I was writing the review to comment on the Criterion Edition Extras, but discovered that, besides making the piece of unwieldy length (particularly for an online essay), it combined two pieces that might best be considered in tandem (independently of each other).

I took the same approach with Performance, discussing the principals' reactions to the film and its place in their careers under the heading 'Background', tackling the film in the mimetic, synergistic style I hope soon to be famous for in a second short essay, 'All the Way'.)

(Read on here:

http://www.themovingpicturewrites.com/?stn=96433&pageno=16&sdb=

"Cheer up you old bugger! Worse things happen at sea!"

Firewatcher's Wages

2011-01-01T14:59:00.000-08:00

MWH Projects Act I

Flames Leap Mountains From Troy to Argos

Scene i Heraclitus Firewatcher Brilliant Noses
...
[the first light onstage is a tiny glow like a candle flame, but fixed, above a wigwam shape with sticks protruding, on the backstage wall left further points of light over stylized bonfire images will appear at intervals throughout, until they form a complete row stage lights begin to come up slowly]

HERACLITUS FIREWATCHER

Awake! stay awake, a year awake! you tell me that's not excessive
A dog's life? not by a long shot, dogs sleep all the time
Wake at the slightest unexpected sound or flicker of light
Wake up and yap like a Barbarian on cue

[stage lights fully up on an otherwise bare stage heraclitus firewatcher, with a few possessions gathered about him, stands by a wigwam-shaped bonfire just waiting to be lit another light flickers up on the wall behind]

Brilliant nose a dog has! might even sniff the blaze
Starting up on a miles-distant hill but that's never been tested
My damn luck, I'm not a dog, I have hands not paws
Opposable thumbs, you need that to hold a torch
Set a fire going to match the fire in the distance
Not to mention how few dogs speak excellent Greek
See what I mean? as you hear me speaking it now
The better to bring the news to our faithful Queen ho ho
What she has in mind for Agamemnon I've heard the rumours
I wouldn't wish on a dog but shh! (fingers to lips)
I might on a King

Scene ii Heraclitus Philosopher beneath skin, above bone

[a man enters wings left, in tattered once-white toga not unfamiliar with holes, and begins to speak out aggressively at the apron
of the stage]

HERACLITUS PHILOSOPHER

intelligence damped and sickened by green paper colour of mould midas it seems is your epitome of earthly success because his touch was instant death to the daughter he loved above all human creatures? i'll grant you, she made an impressive statue had he been a sculptor, known a few friends who resembled the gods, his curse might have served some function statues of gold, colour of mead-darkened piss, more godlike than the gods because he starved, every bit of food he tried to eat turning to useless gold? donkeys are brighter than that, they know garbage at least is edible, gold is just too tough a chew

haven't heard medusa celebrated the same way women had it rough in my time as well

do you imagine croesus diverted the river to right and left so the stream in the middle would no longer be impossible for his soldiers to ford? his money, his implements, many slaves of his purchase and some few skilled workmen in his hire, carried out the work of hands but the work of mind, without which the rest, bold solid streams of mead-darkened piss, would have had no effect, was thales' money is not mind, it has no power apart from the skill deployed in its use (and we thought we were overloaded with gods of our own election, no earthly function in 'em) no value at all if hoarded and stockaded, then it chokes and kills

name a shoe for running after a goddess of swift intelligence, confusing the fiery rapidity of thought more than humanly supple with the gangly fleetness of sweat-reeking ankle, instep and heel (what a lovely libation to offer the goddess that caps their toes!)

claim to know the river you step in is not the river you stand in (any phrase can be turned to gabble it seems) but don't know you who step there are a river coursing vertically beneath skin, above bone, ceaselessly changing, well? (some that only half learned this found a sudden panic as they stepped into the river dissolved their skin carried them rushing away on the current, one with the current, one with the undertow and gone to the grief and astonishment of loved ones and strangers watching from shore

[darts off wings left, pops his head back]

if their bones were ever found i never heard of it)

[exits completely]

Scene iii Heraclitus Firewatcher A Fixed Reliable Commodity

HERACLITUS FIREWATCHER

Don't mind him, we get philosophers all the time coming by to harangue the populace, it's a fulltime occupation among us Greeks Not always that well-paying as you can see, though there are those do all right by teaching Diction, vocabulary, sneaky ways to fool people in an argument mostly This one has the same name as me, Heraclitus and I quite like him Not very social, I'll grant you that, says his piece and then off, not nearly as personable as Diogenes but between the aggression in his voice and the challenge trying to riddle out what his speeches mean, he's useful for keeping a body awake Some of the others could put you to sleep so fast and do I need that? Like I need to forfeit my life on the gibbet or the chopping block (Shivers) Our local chief axeman? gives me the creeping willies I'm sorry but if you've just severed permanently the relationship between a man's head and body, you don't say to the mob of drools and leers panting looking on "It's been a slice" Hemlock you say? That's for a higher class of gent

A knife in a dark corner, extrajudicial? that'll happen
Bold to speak out as these fellows do when you think
How permanent a silence the wrong word can buy you
I do find the more I hear this one speak
The more sense I discover in his words
Some I can't make hide nor hair I'm told these philosophers in their trance states
Sometimes look deep into the future, you'd lose your present day audience there
As if the past and present aren't more than enough mess to deal with!
I tried once you know, stepping in a river?
Sure seemed like the same river when I was standing in it
Even when I stepped out, rivers are a fixed reliable commodity
Compared to human life as it flows out its course
My son among the fallen at Troy? we had messages at irregular intervals
Until three years ago or a little more, since when dead silence
Not a word from him, no other messengers will tell us anything
Sparing our feelings I expect, prize method of accomplishing that!
Confirm our worst fears almost and yet leave hanging
Above our heads on a thin string like Damocles' sword
The fraying hope that if he's far less a hero than Achilles
His prospects of survival at least are better
Not so it seems though perhaps. . . I can't sleep thinking about it
That was a joke, though a bitter one I admit

Death House Comedy

2010-11-11T03:56:00.000-08:00

This is another project I'll be developing further on The Moving Picture Writes and, I hope, eventually as a booklength study.
DEATH HOUSE COMEDY
FELLAS, IM DYING OUT THERE!: DEATH HOUSE COMEDY by Martin Heavisides
Fellas I'm Dying Out There!
http://www.ddwebsites.com/runit/?stn=96412&pageno=16&sdb

The Death of M. Hulot

In the latter part of his career Jacques Tati increasingly found his most famous creation a burden he’d prefer to be free of. He described how he might kill off the bemused pipe smoker with the gangly frame and the fore...-tilted walk, without violating the form and logic that animated his films. (I’d hoped to quote this directly from Tati in a critical biography I read some years ago, but I don’t own it any longer, can’t find it in Toronto’s excellent library system, and find no trace of the passage through the magic of Google, so I’m obliged to reproduce the gist from memory and leave its full elaboration to readers luckier or more patient than I: M. Hulot is in the back kitchen of a restaurant where an incident of gunfire occurs in the dining room. A bullet passes through into the back and strikes Hulot, instantly killing him. The first concern of the restaurauteurs is to make certain this death doesn’t cast a shadow on the reputation of the restaurant, so they arrange to have him transported in a box disguised as goods being shipped out. He passes by the guests of the establishment unnoticed, and the story continues on.)

The instrumental point of this would have been to remove the Hulot millstone from around Tati’s neck, but the significance of the scene should he ever have filmed it—even of that bare description of the scene as here given—would have been much the same as Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus (as Auden described it):

how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W H Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

But even people watching the never-to-be-realized film in which, as it happens, this tragicomic death did not occur, would have had another and sharper reaction. Hulot might well be easily dispensable to the people who hustle his body out of view, and of no account to the people who don’t even notice, in either sense, his passing, but he’s been the fulcrum of the film to this point—assuming Tati has followed the strategy of Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Mon Oncle, Playtime and Trafic—he has anchored the story in some sense and his sudden death must cast the narrative adrift. Therefore his death may impact little on the busy, personally preoccupied lives of the other characters, but it’s a powerful, deranging event for anyone who’s been taken up with the hilarious action to that point.

Astute reviewers—which is to say nobody—would have pointed out how this resembled Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illich—equally profound, funnier of course, and with the added frisson that Tati hadn’t given away the shock of the ending in the title, and in fact hadn’t ended the film there—as in Breughel, death’s an episode, almost invisible—unless made prominently visible for an instant—in a movie whose tidal flow carries on for another full hour of hilarity, minutely observed, crowding every frame. What a moment, and what a film that would have been!

That film would certainly have had a place of honour in a festival of death house comedies. None of those Tati actually did make could—not because they never concerned themselves with death (what self-respecting comic artist could ignore it altogether?) but because they tend to concern themselves with everything, and death is never emphasized as it necessarily would be if Hulot died on camera.

This isn’t a criticism of Tati, merely an attempt to establish boundaries. Death house comedy is by no means the only style of film, or even of comedy, that is serious and engaged at the highest level—but if we’re going to talk about it as a viable category parameters (and other high sounding words) are going to be required. A film needn’t be exclusively about death, or funny all the time (neither of which is even possible) to be a death house comedy. But I think it can reasonably be required to be at least as much preoccupied with death as any subject, and at least as funny as it is anything else.

(I’ve discovered through online filmographies that this was intended as the opening scene of his last, unrealized project, Confusion. It would have taken place behind the scenes on a film set apparently—nice metacinematic touch. According to these commentators it would have been his first non-comedy, but I’m not so sure. I recall Tati’s description of it in an interview I read in the mid seventies—savage satire was what he envisioned, and that was certainly within his range—all his films have passages of that, never as the single dominating mood. And satire is a comic form, even if in the way described by Peter Barnes: “I’ve laughed a lot when I haven’t felt a lot like laughing.” Easy sell? I can imagine the typical response of the money men (les personnes d’argent):

“Let me get this straight Monsieur Hu—Monsieur Tati. You’ve made a number of highly successful comedies, one hugely expensive flop, and one film since that gave a modest return on a very modest budget. You want to reconnect with the huge international audience you once enjoyed how? By killing off one of the most beloved characters in the history of cinema while the virtual impression of the opening credits is still fading from your viewers’ eyeballs? With the promise that things can only get worse from there? I foresee rows and rows of bumless seats. Now a remake in colour of Les Vacances de M. Hulot—that I could slap together a finance package over half a lunch, everone says you’re a master of colour, a true impressionist. Maybe with a younger comic in the role of Hulot.”)

Oozing Life

I never got very far in my one shot at a career in standup. I don't project well and I'm not good at memorizing lines--too lazy really--or at improvising in high pressure situations. I do all right with a few friends in a bar--k...eep my end of the conversation up at least. Onstage I'd clam up, the pipes would shut tight as bivalves and even with the mike at maximum amp I couldn't always guarantee I'd be heard by the back tables--God help me if I'd ever played a hall. I've often wondered how my career might have progressed if I'd taken Idi Amin up on his friendly offer to lend me his bodyguards when I went out to do my five minutes. "I guarantee you'll soon be doing 15 minutes, 30 minutes, even whole nights to yourself."

"Myself and two burly men with loaded Uzis flanking me on either side. Wouldn't it be better to get ahead on my own natural talent?" I don't know why he laughed at that, but he laughed loud and long. Many others, not just me, have attested to how often he'd burst out laughing for no apparent reason at things nobody else could see the humour in.

It's not that none of my lines ever got laughs, and if you want to know the truth, to this very day I still resent that. Time and again I'd be sitting in the crowd watching a comic kill with lines I'd tossed off the night before in my cups. We were working for beer or beer money at best in those days so I could hardly ask 'em to pay for my material, but a word or two of acknowledgment would not have gone amiss. Some have gone on to greater success and throw me the odd buck out of shame, but regrettably the richest and most famous of them are completely shameless, my standard of living and position in the industry would be very different today if it were otherwise. What I wouldn't give for a second chance to take up Idi's offer of lead weighted muscle. I can't recall a single instance of any comic lifting one of his gags.

If you were unaware of Idi Amin's brief stab at making it in show biz, you're not alone. You could fill arenas with people who don't know that about the iconic figurehead who went on to become Uganda's strongman/funnyman/absolute leader. I couldn't tell you for certain when it was--around the time of the first village massacre? maybe as late as the expulsion of Uganda's entire Asian immigrant population?--but somewhere in there he quietly deleted those couple of years from his resume.

He didn't exactly fail as a standup, matter of fact he was steadily building a following before he abandoned it for greater, more terrible ambitions. The click of the safeties was easily as effective as a drum roll for punch line punctuation, particularly if you as an audience member knew or suspected these were not prop weapons clutched in those huge mitts. The laughs may have been nervous but they were plentiful and if by chance they weren't? "It's a sure fire thing with me," he'd chuckle. "One way or another, when I do a show, I kill."

Ceci n'est pas un livre du cinema

2010-11-07T07:11:00.000-08:00

Ceci n’est pas un livre du cinema
At present ceci n’est pas un essai seulement—in ten sections, nine thousand three hundred fifty words, mostly taken up with analyses of films like F for Fake, Vanya on 42nd St, Fellini’s Clowns, which I characterize as ‘documentary fictions’. Also a couple of self-written examples:
One of the two children I’d invited to join me across the street was hanging out the back of a helicopter taxi giving grid coordinates to where they were meeting us—must have seemed strange to the driver, but t...he crosswalks are intricate up here by this last subway stop before open water and people lose their way easily. I was more nervous about the boy hanging out the back, but he scampered back in as the ‘copter began its sweep round a tower in the middle of the harbour to look back on the city beyond. What had surprised me was the country coordinate (which you always have to give a helicab driver, it’s a formal requirement even for intra-city travel: pilots have intricate guidelines and restrictions concerning flight to certain countries and better safe than sorry, also sometimes they can hook you up with a helicopter at another destination that is allowed into that country and perhaps has regulation armour and defensive weaponry as the situation might require, not that you’d need that in Wales but it did surprise me—knew the call I was taking was well outside my usual boundaries but Wales!? maybe unbeknownst to myself I was part of a courier exchange) now the helicopter rounds back on a slow circle to its near destination—first look I’ve had at the skyline though ‘I’ am not technically on board the helicopter—ever shifting multi-perspective view, don’t get a lot of that in real life. Distant skyline dominated by a row of smoke belching industrial behemoths, don’t see that in a lot of cities anymore, suspect it’s not at all typical of Wales. Shaped a little like a sooty, flame-shooting pipe organ. When the helicopter arcs toward the dockside where my friends and I are waiting it’s completely changed from my first view of it when I walked over from the subway just moments before. Then the complex of buildings behind it were square-edged and mainly of pink brick, now they’re round-edged—interwoven half globes ten storeys high—and mainly of white marble. Not every city can house two completely different building complexes in the same space depending on what? time of day, fall of light, angle of approach from which they’re viewed? At least the floating dock the helicab touches down on hasn’t changed, except I half remember it was a fixed dock before.

A woman who’s held on in the street vending trade long after the rest of us abandoned it is here, having packed up a little while ago. I asked her how business was and she said not too bad. She could use an easily portable tent for the rough weather days, a friend was improvising something light and flexible until she could afford a proper one, maybe at the next economic turnaround she wasn’t holding her breath. I know it’s not a sustainable life anymore, what with the harassing regulations and the drying up of business, even at Christmas, to virtually nothing. Still when I see one of us pioneers at it yet, I feel a twinge of nostalgia. Maybe the regulations are more vendor-friendly this corner of Wales. Wonder what the distance charge on the envelope I just delivered is going to be?

A writer friend I’ve never met personally, just know through an online workshop is among the dozen or so of us assembled now the two children have landed. She’s in a wheelchair which I think is only temporary, and is asking directions to a stop I already know—it’s where I started from on my trip to make this delivery. She’s prepared to wheel the ten blocks I walked from the last connecting bus, but now I know there’s a subway so near I can direct her there—even accompany her, it’s on my way and the 100 interconnecting subway and lrt lines are confusing for a newcomer. We’ll soon discover that seven of them interconnect with the stop she wants to go to.
Meanwhile the whole group of us has a lottery ticket we bought by assembling every nickel, dime and occasional quarter we had in our pockets, and are trying to check it in a newspaper whose format’s a little baffling. Strange to see so many visitors to our fair city gathered on one dock, says the kiosk vendor, especially as it’s not at all the high tourist season. What’s kiosk business like? I ask, still pining for the old days in micro-scale street level retail.

What’ll we do when we win the lottery? someone asks and I notice there’s a high level of confidence that we will. It won’t do us much good, I say, as this is all happening in a dream. Hey! everyone shouts back in unison, don’t rain on our parade! Last time we had serious flooding, says the kiosk vendor, it washed away the entire city which had to be hastily reassembled for an international conference. Terrible sudden deficit expense, but a boon for the construction trade. That’s neither here nor there but thinking it over I decide to go with group consensus and look on the positive side. Stranger things have happened than that a lottery ticket in a dream . . . but what I’m really wishing is that I could have gotten a movie camera in for the duration of this and gotten it out after.

The project began, and grew from, a study of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil where:

Tokyo is mostly a night or interior city in Sans Soleil, seen under a wide range of artificial lights that grow progressively more distorted. The simplest level i...s familiar to every city dweller: street lamps, neon (fixed and firm or lightly sputtering), the grey –white pallor cast by tube lighting in pachinko parlours, the dancing light show on pachinko boards (roughly analogous to pinball consoles) and video terminal screens. (There’s a brief passage on the historical significance of Pac-Man.) At another remove are passages drawn from television screens (one of many sorts of incorporated ‘found’ footage in the film): Marker makes no effort to soften the distortion that normally occurs when televised images are filmed direct from the screen. There’s even the suspicion he may be in some way enhancing it, but I think that’s more the effect of the images themselves, supersaturated with vivid colours that sometimes clash violently enough you might almost say they’re at war with each other. A degree of harmony is restored, paradoxically, by the thoroughly jiggered images of the computer programmer Hayao Yamenake (according to Wikipedia, another of Marker’s inventions—he created these manipulated images himself), deranging naturalistic images partly by pixilation, partly by altering their colour fields, into something whose pattern is still discernible—at least if you’re familiar before hand with the image being altered, and he largely transforms images previously seen in travelogue or documentary footage—but considerably abstracted, kaleidoscoped, taking on an other-worldly glow. He calls the region of virtual space these images occupy The Zone, after that region in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalker.

But there are sunlit exterior scenes in Tokyo as well, and daytime exteriors predominate in footage from other locations—Iceland, the Ile de France, Guinea Bissau. Odd in a film called Sans Soleil, but sunlight (bonsoir Magritte) is absent in its presence here, since it’s captured on film, not by the eye (ceci n’est pas la lumiere de la soleil). On the other hand the ultimate source of all light on earth (it would be different in another solar system) is our sun; in that sense, no matter how processed, distorted, artificially extruded, the source of all light in Sans Soleil remains the sun. (It’s curious incidentally how readily we think of sunlight and rain in the same language: I had to throw away earlier drafts in which I persisted in talking of light ‘streaming’ or scenes ‘drenched’ in light.)
Like the sun, the film’s two narrators are omnipresent yet absent. The author of the letters that describe its various scenes and actions, Sandor Krasna, is neither heard nor seen: the reader of them, played by Florence Delay in French, Alexandra Stewart in English, Riyoko Ikeda in Japanese, Charlotte Kerr in German, is heard almost constantly but never seen. The words she speaks are written in another’s voice but spoken in her own, which must be assumed to inflect and alter their significance in subtle ways—there’s a sense of constantly listening for the voice behind the voice, reinforced by ritual repetitions of “He wrote to me”. (Besides which she acts as editor, selecting from a presumably large body of letters the comments that will represent them over particular scenes.) More present in absence than either of these is the true author, not only of Krasna’s letters but of Krasna and the narrator, the film’s maker Chris Marker. (This being the pseudonym of a director whose given name is something completely different, Chris Marker too is one of the film maker’s inventions. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, a large section of the film is given over to a meditation on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.)

Fiction or documentary? Yes, and a subtly powerful inquiry into the porous borderland between the two, frequently thought of as having no point of contact, let alone impermeation. The fascinating sequence on Vertigo—clearly a fictional film—plays off against passages sampled from purely documentary works like The Death of a Giraffe—one of the few passages left entirely without commentary—for a reason that’s self evident, watching: the horrific sequence as it unfolds is its own commentary, words of any kind would be superfluous. The commentary on Vertigo may be more nearly documentary than the samplings from other documentaries, since these are assimilated to the musings of the fictional Sandor Krasna. (This brings to mind other mixed form experiments: Fellini’s I Clowns, Herzog’s Fata Morgana, Moretti’s Caro Diario. This being a ‘genre’ unusually free of established rules—for purists even a genre that perhaps shouldn’t exist, though I think it’s only problematic if the elements of fictional contrivance are perfidiously concealed—it’s unsurprising that each has a peculiar signature of its own, unique as a fingerprint.

In keeping with its theme of presence-in absence, the fingerprint of Sans Soleil is perhaps invisible to some viewers altogether, and keeps appearing and vanishing once you become aware of it. Many viewers I’m sure glance over the final credits perfunctorily or make for the exits while they’re playing, and that’s the only place in the film where the fictional letter writer Sandor Krasna is mentioned: so it’s easy enough to assume these are simply Chris Marker’s own comments on materials from a video diary of his travels into several remote regions of the world. (In fact they wouldn’t be entirely mistaken in thinking so.) It’s even likely there fare fans of Chris Marker who are unaware that’s not his real name—I know because I’ve been a fan for decades, since I saw La Jetee (which makes a cameo appearance in Sans Soleil), and only discovered this myself a few years ago, reading it in the notes on a Chris Marker retrospective at Cinematheque.

The voice of Sandor Krasna is persuasively mundane yet conversational, with an eye for the telling image, an ear for the telling image, a natural bent for elaborate theorising—it requires a real effort of concentration to remember that this is a narrator, perhaps not at all times a reliable one. That concentration may open the mind to wider speculations: is sunlight natural or artificial? Is the image I see on the screen present? In a sense yes, for there it is; in a sense no, because with rare exceptions every image we see on film was recorded in the past. (Sandor Krasna speculates, or appears to, at one point that images might be sent back from the future as well—but this has little relevance at our present state of comparatively primitive technology: we don’t even know yet how to send a camera into the dream.) Ultimately we might be driven back to Heraclitus’s question: is the river I step in the river I stand in? the film I began watching the one I see through to its end. And then perhaps to wonder. . . )

The Moving Picture Writes

2010-10-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

As soon as I've familiarized myself with the system enough so that I can set up new content steadily and reliably, I'll be inaugurating a movie/tv appreciation website. Under the above title I'll be offering, from time to time, memoirs of m...y encounters over the years with film and, increasingly, tv. Under other headings I'll be doing film reviews, background studies, film commentary reviews (the first of these for The Ruling Class, since I planned when I was writing the review to comment on the Criterion Edition Extras, but discovered that, besides making the piece of unwieldy length (particularly for an online essay), it combined two pieces that might best be considered in tandem (independently of each other). I took the same approach with Performance, discussing the principals' reactions to the film and its place in their careers under the heading 'Background', tackling the film in the mimetic, synergistic style I hope soon to be famous for in a second short essay, 'All the Way'.)

I won't be attempting to keep au courant with new movies, still less with the daily, hourly, minutely stream of movie gossip. I was advised by the woman who originally suggested developing this website that a number of others failed simply because of the need to keep up to date. There are two excellent reasons to take the desultory approach I have, filling in patches from the history of film here and there as it may be, not necessarily ignoring current releases but not trying to deal with them exhaustively. The first is that I'm at a disadvantage, compared to the days when I used to see four films in a slow week, having neither the time, energy nor money to keep up a comparable pace while working at a physically demanding full time job that pays broken bits of peanuts. I have to be selective even when it comes to seeing historically important films I've missed or would like to see again, when they play at Cinematheque or the new TIFF facility. If I were seeing films at the old pace--and I'm hopeful the website might prove a means of enabling me to--I still wouldn't want to chain myself to the routine of a daily, weekly or monthly reviewer making consumer reports instead of studies and evaluations, obliged to find something to say aout a slew of films the great majority of which (especially when they're hugely popular) would best be passed over in silence. Not long ago at the opening of TIFF's lightbox I looked over their list of the 100 essential films. Apart from violently disagreeing with some of their choices (goes without saying, de gustibus furio disputandam), I knew I could easily come up with a rival list of a hundred films as important as the (85 or so) choices they'd made that I didn't dispute, and that wouldn't begin to exhaust the number worth writing about. Why waste time, with no hint from the cosmos that I'll violate the norms of existence and prove imortal, writing about the inessentials?

Independently of its worth (I hope) as an artistic venture, there's a commercial motive to developing this website--to generate a steady stream of income that will (at least) replace what I can make as a courier, so that I can make this and other writing projects (of which more later) my fulltime occupation in future. That'll depend on income from advertising, revenue streaming, generating interest in a book project perhaps, essays and lectures? perhaps, but that'll depend on building a solid readership. For which reason once the site's up, I'd appreciate if any of you who like my weekly offerings not only visit regularly but spread the word to friends you think might be interested. With any luck it'll be awesome. We'll talk.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/MWH-Projects/156487567714135?ref=ts

Twelve Angry Men

2010-09-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

"In 12 Angry Men (1957) [Henry Fonda] was the only voice of reason when an innocent boy is being railroaded on a murder case."
--Robert Fulford, Aug 31, 2010, National Post

It's pleasant to see how somethings don't change; Bob Fulford, for example, after all these years still rigorously eschewing nuance and subtlety in his analysis of film. About the only way he could improve on this travesty of a capsule review would be by remembering Henry Fonda pulling a Perry Mason with a last minute reveal of the guilty criminal.

I don't know how you'd find any evidence of railroading on the part of the prosecution; what they do is put together a neat tidy case based partly on circumstantial evidence, partly on an eyewitness identification nobody seems to know is suspect. (If the prosecution is aware the eyewitness is nearsighted and wasn't wearing her glasses when she made the ID, they can be accused of railroading even if they believe the circumstantial evidence and think the witness ties it up with a ribbon, but isn't crucial in itself. But I don't recall there being any suggestion of that. Surely the possibility of an apparently unbeatable case being made, in good faith, out of a succession of such imperfectly linked pieces of evidence is unsettling enough without any assumption of police or prosecutorial malice.)

If it's the jury who are railroading the accused, they don't do much of a job of it, slidng over one by one to a not guilty verdict over a single afternoon of deliberations--and if Fonda's character is the sole voice of reason how does that happen? Not only are they won over by his arguments, they are won over by their own--Fonda's character only starts the ball rolling. If he were the unique voice of reason the most he could have achieved would be a hung jury, eleven for conviction v. one for acquittal.

As for 'an innocent boy'--that's the plot pivot for a much more straightforward melodrama than Twelve Angry Men. When Fonda's character says "We may never know what happened that night," he means precisely that; they don't vote acquittal because they're certain he's innocent but because what looked like a rock solid case against him has revealed cracks and fissures which crumble it to bits. On the presumption of innocence he's innocent, and the odds are that he actually is--but high odds are not a certainty, and what's most interesting about Reginald Rose's play in all its incarnations--on television, film and the legitimate stage--is its creative integration of uncertainty, normally an element vigorously excised from courtroom/trial drama.

Death House Comedy

2010-05-31T04:05:00.001-07:00

New essay up at The Linnet's Wings (www.thelinnetswings.net) Comes with its own screening room by way of informal footnotes.

Armstrong in The Linnets Wings

2010-03-10T03:42:00.000-08:00

Facebook | Martin Heavisides Elvis Presley didn’t break down racial barriers in the music industry, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington did. . . Fats Waller was a one of the world’s biggest radio stars when Presley was in short pants, and if he’d been alive still in 1957 maybe he’d have had a big hit with Hound Dog and we’d know at last how that song should be done. http://www.thelinnetswings.net/?stn=96409&pageno=16

Armstrong in The Linnets Wings

2010-01-30T17:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.thelinnetswings.net/?stn=96409&pageno=16&sdb=

Taste Test

2010-01-17T17:21:00.000-08:00

Taste Test

They blindfolded our entire section for the in-flight meal. This was annoying because I had a window seat and we were flying toward the sun, but apparently it was in the fine print of something we'd signed on boarding. They were kidding I'm sure when they said the pressure door's that way, we have parachutes should you require them, but you don't want to take the chance. The carrots tasted like rutabaga which is really strange since I've never eaten rutabaga so how would I know? I'm not saying it tasted like good rutabaga anymore than the spinach tasted like good mashed potatoes or the beefsteak like good chocolate pudding. Now every time I see a chocolate pudding I think about mad cow disease. I suppose that makes sense since it's a milk-based product.

Other testees reported variable but equally subjective tastings. I don't think anybody correctly identified a single serving. Orange juice tasted like tequila, I don't know why that couldn't happen to me (especially since they were charging for drinks on the flight). On the plus side I didn't get the ravioli which tasted like earthworms still covered in gritty soil, though she didn't mind. Said it took her back to when she'd been a bird in happy transient flight once upon a time. Until she was caught and snapped dead by a hooded falcon but that's another story. She later married the falcon but that was another life.

When they removed my blindfold the clouds below our wing were awrithe with serpents and agallop with stallions. I had to wonder how even a billowing cumulus cloud could hold up so vivid and solid a tusked woolly mammoth. Remember thinking maybe that's where all the prehistoric creatures went instead of becoming extinct. It seems a more sensible choice. Through a gap in the cloud I could see the ocean below which was on fire. Green, orange, lavender and bright blue flames. In a subsequent letter I was informed the probable reason for these visions and the wildly subjective taste impressions both was the substantive dose of lysergic acid dialethamate in our lemon iced vanilla cake. (It tasted like hominy grits, which is not my idea of dessert.) They said it altered our perceptions backward as well as forward in time because it was a new, unusually proactive variety. But how did the acid know in advance who was going to ingest it? I think personally the reason was the time zones we were passing through.

I have no idea the purpose of this study, but I for one will study the fine print in airline contracts a great deal more watchfully in future.

Eric Rohmer 1920-2010

2010-01-17T07:49:00.000-08:00

Eric Rohmer 1920-2010
On Jan 11 one of the finest of the French New Wave directors (who began his career, as a number of them did, writing on film for Cahier du Cinema) died at the age of 89. His last film was completed two years before. Every film he made from 1981 (Le Beau Mariage) to 2007 (Les Amours d'Astree et de Celadon) is one more argument against Quentin Tarantino's contention that filmmakers almost never produce first rate movies after the age of 60. So are the later films of Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette, in fact among genuinely distinguished directors who survived past 60 and remained active, there are easily as many exceptions to as confirmations of this very rough rule of thumb. (Mounting evidence suggests Tarantino's best-before year may have been his fortieth or even his thirty fifth.)

The obit I read in the Globe and Mail (taken off the wires from the Manchester Guardian) has this to say about his first film and its promise for his career:

"Le Signe du Lion, completed in 1959 after one false start and a handful of shorts, fitted comfortably into the New Wave formula of Parisian life, with its tale of a student musician, tempted nto debt by a promised inheritance, who lapses into abject destitution after the legacy turns out to be a hoax.
"In retrospect, one can clearly see in it the seeds of Rohmer's later work. Showing little interest in plot or action, Rohmer concentrates on showing how Paris itself becomes an objective correlative to the hero's state of mind, gradually metamorphosing from a welcoming city into a bleak stone desert as he realizes that the friends from whom he might hope to borrow are all away for the vacation."

I'm very grateful, given its shoddy character, that this was the only synopsis of a Rohmer film attempted. Key point in rebuttal: Pierre (Jess Hahn) doesn't discover the inheritance was a hoax; he learns his aged relative changed her will when she heard that he'd run into debt and a dissipated life and--I expect most crucially for her--began neglecting his music in anticipation of a huge legacy that would free him from any obligation to work, develop talent or follow a determinate course of any kind. Only on the quite unfounded assumption that the inheritance is a hoax can you get by with the preposterous notion that Rohmer, in this film or any of those that follow, shows little interest in plot or action. If you add inaction as action's dynamic counterpoint, with choice as the fulcrum that balances the two, you understand the importance of his seamlessly intricate plots as revelations of character. They're there in all his stories, and they aren't hard to find unless you begin with the persuasion that plot OR character must predominate in the telling of any story: but in the most satisfying ones they always collaborate as equal partners.)

Not long after seeing Le Signe du Lion I looked it up in one of those omnibus film studies under the letter 'L'. I discovered to my astonishment that the reviewer thought it a remarkable debut, marred by a too-pat happy ending. What film had the reviewer been seeing? What happens in the last scene of Le Signe du Lion is that, casually betraying the man who's kept him alive at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Pierre rides happily and furiously off on a suddenly cresting wave toward almost certain catastrophe. These are not points made obscurely or oversubtly; they will occur spontaneously to any reviewer who simply pays attention, which I'll grant you a well firmed body of assumption and resultant theory makes it almost impossible to do.
The only other fable of despair that I know of in Rohmer is Les Nuit de la Pleine Lune (1984) (though a case could be made for La Collectioneuse, which certainly is engagingly grim). It’s perhaps characteristic of Rohmer’s work as it can be seen to develop over a long, rigorously planned-out career, that his lead this time is female. (The leads in Six Contes Moraux are all male; in Comedies et Proverbes all female with the interesting variation that Pauline a la Plage has two female leads of equal prominence, as does Quatre Aventure de Reinette et Mirabelle; I’ve seen only trois of the Quatre Saisons group, and the count is 2 females to 1 male; I’d have thought according to previously established pattern that the lead in the fourth, Conte d’Hivre, would be male, but the synopsis suggests this is another story centred on a woman. Odd shift of emphasis, but he had his reasons I suppose.)
Equally characteristic is the difference between Les Nuit. . .’s Louise (Pascale Ogier) and Pierre. Rohmer’s male leads all tend to be in a state of drift until a clear choice presents itself. (In one of the subtlest, Conte d’Ete ,Gaspard’s choice grows progressively clearer, but never quite clear to him, and so he misses it: which is bittersweet but not tragic because there’s no sense his character is firmed enough that he will always fail to recognize what life precariously offers.) His women most often have to deal with forced choices; ones they try to will into being or ones connived at for them by close female friends. (Women connive at choices for male friends also, which they go along with, insofar as they do, as part of their tendency to drift: leave choices to others.)
Beatrice Romand played Sabine in Le Beau Mariage (1981), who tries to break the cycle of drift in her life by breaking up with her married boyfriend (a wise move) and entering upon a campaign to meet and marry—not live with, never merely that again—an eligible man she can love through life, at the earliest possible opportunity. Nothing goes right with the man she fixes on because she’s driven by compulsion, not free choice. When the skein of her plans and expectations has thoroughly unravelled, a moment of warm eye contact with a stranger on a train suggests hmm. . . real possibilities if she can let feeling grow in its own natural soil.
In Conte d’Automne the same actress plays Magali, who meets a man at a party on her friend’s estate, for which she’s supplied the wine, a recent bottling she’s particularly proud of from her own vineyard. There’s a sudden, fierce mutual attraction—complicated and almost derailed when she senses her friend has connived at this chance meeting (and for devious intricacy this connivance was a beaut). She breaks off the evening with him rather than explode—likes him too much to be altogether angry, doesn’t trust herself to maintain a false calm. When they meet again—neither by contrivance nor entirely by chance—later that same evening, she’s had it out with her friend, regained composure—once again they get along famously. A forced choice for once takes on the aspect of a natural choice after all.
Delphine in Le Rayon Vert is perhaps the most perplexed of Rohmer’s heroes or heroines, simultaneously in a state of aimless drift and making forcible, abrupt choices that puzzle others and frustrate herself. The pain she experiences on this account, coupled with her ferocious sincerity, is tremendously affecting. Ultimately she decides to resolve her perplexities by a lightning test of her perceptiveness, and make her answer to a proposition that would change the course of her life depend on whether her eyes can detect a natural appearance that vanishes almost as it’s seen. (A similar test illuminates The Blue Minute, premier des quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle.)
If men tend to evade serious choices by drifting, women by trying to force choices that cut across the grain, which for that reason usually fail wholly or partially, it’s perhaps not surprising that the woman who comes nearest to duplicating Pierre’s appalling fate is the one who forces a choice and has it succeed, catastrophically—Louise in Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune.
It’s obvious why no one has taken the ending of Les Nuits . . . as happy, artificially or otherwise: Louise’s world has fallen apart, she’s at the lowest ebb of fortune’s wheel and, trying to retrieve herself, makes a choice more desperate dthan the one that began her descent. I suppose I can see how, on a superficial reading, the sudden restoration of a huge fortune to a man so careless that his first act on hearing of it is to desert and betray a man who saved his life is a happy ending, if the man he betrays reads to you (as he does to the reviewer I cited) as local colour, not a human being, and if the pervious inheritor of this fortune, a psychological match for Pierre, died in an auto smashup which is why Pierre has been reinstated as heir—all that might read as an artificially happy ending on the shallow consumerist principles that dominate the box office, hence the consciousness of reviewers, if dark portents for the future are declared strictly out of bounds. (The number of betrayals that slide by as inconsequential in a typical hero(ine)’s progress to a happy ending would be a study in themselves; as would the varied strategies for muffling and obscuring the time stamp for expiry of any happily ever after. Brecht didn’t call this style of storytelling illusionist for nothing.)
There are dimensions within and beyond dimensions in Rohmer’s films. To keep this within reasonable length I’ve limited myself to a few words on the characteristic pattern of his plots, what it suggests about his ideas of human character, limiting myself to skeletal outlines without, I hope, violating too much the complexity with which these are worked out in practice by his consistent method. Beyond that I’ll happily enough write elucidations at greater length on individual movies from time to time, as the mood strikes, giving myself room to touch on the intimate tangle of his subplots and secondary characters, any of which—almost any individual scene taken in isolation—would reward study at much greater length than this, but as a writer with my own work to get on with, I prefer to leave that study to the busy workings of my subconscious, to be dredged up impromptu perhaps, where appropriate, in conversation with fellow cineastes at tony parties should I ever arrive at a position where I’m invited.

I Live in the Real World

2010-01-09T07:16:00.000-08:00

Can you recall an occasion when you’ve heard this said in good faith? without a superadded tone of belligerent outrage to boot? Whenever I hear that tone of aggressive don’t-you-tell-me! moral indignation, I know I’m hearing a vocal mask of bad conscience—hear it in my own voice I know it’s time to rethink seriously whatever I’ve just said.
A few years back I wrote to a National Post columnist about what I thought was a rather bizarre contention: that the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein was a triumph of natural justice. Her reply turned on that sentence: “I live in the real world”—a world, apparently, in which natural justice can embrace the assassination of three consecutive defence attorneys—no doubt to encourage the fourth—and, in general, trial proceedings that—I kid you not, look up the news reports of the time if you don’t believe me—resembled nothing so much as those of the Red Queen’s court in Alice in Wonderland. Apparently we’ve been wrong about Lewis Carroll all this time; he was actually a naturalist in the manner of Emile Zola.
Of course Lewis Carroll was writing about the real world—aspects of it I should say, that’s all any of us can claim—telling the truth but telling it slant as Emily Dickinson put it. Thought I don’t think the word totalitarian had been coined yet, the court of the Red Queen strikes me as a far more astute vision of totalitarianism than George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell imagines a middle level bureaucrat like O’Brien could be a philosopher prince—or is forced to pretend he does, since otherwise he can’t get out the reams and reams of argument he has to fall back on, lacking the skill to show the intricate apparatus of totalitarianism—instead he has to turn a character into his mouthpiece, improbably and at whew! length, so he can tell tell tell you what he thinks. It’s what happens when you send an impatient schoolmaster to do a novelist’s job (and his fervid misrepresentation of Gulliver’s Travels shows he was equally as capable a misreader of novels).
None of the attendants at the Red Queen’s court pauses in frenzied action to give a solemn exposition of its inner workings at a hundred pages’ length—the chop logic they speak very frequently conveys sense (hidden from themselves), but their words don’t explain the social order—they reveal it. So do their actions—principally variations of running around like chickens with their heads cut off, mainly in the devout hope that they can thereby prevent their actual heads from being, you know, actually cut off. Motions of that kind—paranoid, frenetic, scrabbling—are constant in Stalin’s Russia as well—from the lowest level at its outer to the highest level at its inner circle. A middle manager like O’Brien in such a maelstrom will have little time to concentrate his thoughts , what with the huge proportion of every working day and restless sleeping night that must be given over to metaphorically, and on some occasions perhaps literally (state occasions I’d be inclined to say, but that may be editorializing) pissing his pants with fear.
The curious thing about the columnist who argued the Red Queen’s court was an admirable model of natural justice is that she’s interesting and provocative—on the euthanasia movement, feminism and men’s rights, the rising tide of anti-semitism in polite society and (perhaps most worrying) public schools—whenever she engages with the world around her. Her occasional book reviews are a delight—where the subject isn’t overtly political—because she has far more practical aesthetic sense than most professional reviewers. It’s only when alarmist tendencies send her back to the entrenched redoubt of living in the real world that she ever talks solemn nonsense, as in a recent column commending realists (rightists) and savaging dreamers (leftists) in our society for their respective views on militant Islam. Apart from the fact that it was right-wing realists whose dream of miring the Soviet Union in Afghanistan precipitated the exponential leap forward in power and militancy of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, this is a classic example of an either /or question—“Are you a realist or a dreamer?”—that can only be coherently answered “Yes”. It’s possible to criticize a particular dream on any number of counts—it’s wishy-washy; too aggressively self-centred; so unfocussed it has no centre at all; seems high sounding and noble but would lead in practice to self-replicating (self-exploding) nightmares—but it’s pointless to criticize (or praise) anyone for being a dreamer if it’s impossible to discover a single example of a human being who isn’t.

find the wheel

2009-12-17T18:12:00.000-08:00

(A Fun interpretation by a fellow scribe, Gabriel Orgrease, of a piece by me called

Find the Wheel

Frequently when writers tell stories in unconventional ways--which may be defined as "ways a particular reader is uncomfortable or unfamiliar with"--they are accused of trying to reinvent the wheel. My reply to this has always been:

Telling a story is a completely different kettle of fish from reinventing the wheel. They're horses of a different stripe, and so's a zebra. Some scientists maintain an ostrich is a giraffe of a different neck but I'm not altogether persuaded this reasoning is sound. We're on safer ground I'd say, maintaining that the correct shape of a wheel, for maximum effectiveness, is round and the same might be said, in a way, of the palindrome. But is palindromic invariably the correct shape of a story? It would certainly cut down the size of the slush piles.

Very few fish, while we're on the subject, are round, and to the best of my knowledge at least, no Kentucky Derby winners. Tigers aren't especially round, nor are they horses of a different stripe, though I suppose there are some who might disagree. To convince themselves that this is wrong, I recommend they try saddling a Siamese. (There are obvious arguments against saddling a tiger.) Then again I've never been accused of trying to reinvent the tiger--why is that do you suppose?

Not that I'm looking to take on the project. I don't think I have a single idea that would be a real improvement on the current design, and anyway it's inadvisable for me--I always get too close to my work.

People are rarely round, especially in North--wait a minute, I'd better rethink that one.

Trees embody roundness as a dynamic component of their form, maybe I could reinvent the tree. What would a story look like if it looked like a tree? It's true that a printed book has leaves. . .

Maybe I could reinvent the shaggy dog. True, a certain number of readers are allergic, but who imagines it's possible to please everybody? Did you ever hear of a book with a sold out print run of six billion copies, or even close?

I'm not sure what my point is--then again if this is a wheel, why should it have a point? Actually it would have an infinite number of points (doesn't sound possible I know, but it's true--an infinite number, count 'em up yourself if you don't believe me). That sounds like a lot of points but none of them is the point, since they can't be (successively or predecessively) distinguished from each other. So, fine, I have no point--I should presume to reinvent the wheel? Make it square with clearcut corners that each come to a point, that would cut down on functionality some. But does a story have a function? Have to think about that one. Organize a multi-participant debate. Does anybody know who you'd contact to. . . ?

Grown Ups

2009-11-19T19:41:00.001-08:00

Years ago back in Saskatoon I was part of the set up and performance of a Winter concert (poetry, music, skits)—Sundog it was called for the rainbows ‘round the sun you can see with particular vividness on a Prairie winter’s iciest days. Two of the organizers’ children were making a lot of commotion and getting in the way. A parent gave them the most ambivalent dressing down I’ve ever heard—scolding himself as much as them for insisting they stop acting like children, or go someplace where they wouldn’t interfere with things. “So if you don’t want to play that game of being boring adults, you don’t have to. But you have to play someplace else.” I watched the two children a moment after he’d walked away. The young girl broke the silence by saying to the younger boy, “Come on. We’ll be adults.” So for the next two hours that’s what they played at; as we all do.

Sounds of Silence

2009-11-11T17:44:00.000-08:00

A blaring voice over TTC Speakers--heard it two,three times in my travels up and down--informed riders that at eleven o'clock the subway system would observe two minutes' silence in remembrance of our veterans. It occured to me since the speakers are silent mosty of the time, the only way to indicate the reason for this silence would be to announce first, that it was beginning, next, that it had just concluded. I've been on the subway at eleven on Remembrance Day and never noticed that they did that. Usually I only noticed after the time was past.

The canonical or official time, of course, is 11:11. That was the time I observed it, sectioning off the moment with a sip at 11:11, then a second at 11:13, of Creemore. Between these I tried to make the stillness in my head match the quiet around me.

Novel Launch (ii) The Day Itself

2009-10-11T06:28:00.001-07:00

I always enjoy visiting Word on the Street, but it's a very different feeling to be personally involved. I was able to show an actual book to old friends like Stuart Ross at their tables. I was able to inscribe a few copies to actual buyers--not enough to give me writer's cramp by the end of the day, but eight copies, a little under half of which were bought by people who didn't know me personally.

I'll be busy the next two weeks reading books I picked up at the fair, not only a few I bought but four other titles from Crossing Chaos that the publisher passed on to me. Today I'm looking at Yang Chu''s Poems by Duane Locke--read and enjoyed a number of them Sunday. He's in his nineties apparently, publishing snce the forties and this is his nineteenth book Definitely have to Google him.

I reread mine yesterday in the free moments of my courier rounds--the standbys, the subway rides between calls. I was pleased to see five proofreads each by my publisher, another reader and myself had actually eliminated almost all the typos. There was a rather embarrassing one in the 'teaser' I wrote for the back cover (which they didn't send me to proofread)--the dreaded misplaced apostrophe: 'song styling's of owls'. (Yes, I admit it, there's a poet/singer in my novel who is an owl; performs under the stage name Minerva.) The worst of it is I can't think how anybody but me ould have been responsible for that one. (Though looking it up just now I find no trace of an apostrophe in the original:

It's so lovely being all of you this evening

Smoke, intelligent fog, fun house mirrors, death house aesthetics, a city lit from within and a city of living houses. Riddles and enigmas. What was that language, where is its key? City webworks for instant travel by elevator or magic bus. People who are you and me only fictional. Elf clubs burrowed snug in the friendly earth and nightclubs whose floor show is literally murder. St James Infirmary as you've never heard it in your life before. Song stylings of owls. Storytellers way too invowen with the stories they tell. Red and blue water on tap. Dream or real? you or me?
happening to us or do we make it happen? Plain language that almost makes sense. Bloodsuckers alive and undead. A once-majestic hall of mirrors that now exists somewhere between memory and legend. "Alive and und--ead, alive and unde--ead. . . " Vomiting parties, economic indices, themebook competitions. Action and suspense, stories that begin. Till human voices wake us.
Have you noticed how cities are like dreams? Anything imaginable can happen in them. Cut the deck and snap! the cards. Step right up.

So who knows where the insidious misplaced apostrophe came from? Probably the same place as the misspelling of my name: "Martin Heavidsides" on the spine. These are the things that'll make that print run instantly recognizable to collectors in years to come.)

Undermind in Crossing Chaos Catalogue

Novel Launch

2009-09-06T16:35:00.000-07:00

I've waited to announce the publication of my novel UNDERMIND 'til I was sure when it was due, which I finally found out late last month: this month, with the launch scheduled for Word on the Street (Toronto) Sept 27.

Not Twice This Play Redux

2009-04-17T17:49:00.000-07:00

Just a note to say The Living Theatre in New York is going to be presenting a staged reading of Empty Bowl on Monday Apr 27.

Not Twice This Play

Empty Bowl is rewritten, rethought and considerably expanded from a one act play I wrote in 1993, inch foot time gem, which for a one act play intended to run an hour had far too many irreducible flaws. Whole scenes intended to capture the enigmatic character of the Zen koan came out obscurantist and befuddling rather; those I excised. In Act III of Empty Bowl I re-used about two pages of Eshun's long speech from the earlier play, though most of Eshun's dialogue's original to this version. None of the other characters already featured--Nobunaga, Nobushige, Hakuin, Peasant in Blue Kimono (renamed Ainu in Empty Bowl)--spoke in their real voices yet, so their dialogue here is totally fresh. (I tell a lie. I did retain two lines from the earlier, much shorter version of the fairground shell game scene:

NOBUNAGA

It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

AINU

I dunno. Six of one, half dozen of the other if you ask me.

Well, would you have cut that?)

The prologue, 'inch foot', and the epilogue, 'not twice this day', considerably reworked, still frame the action of Empty Bowl. Quite a few images I thought effective have been retained, such as Ainu, back from numerous campaigns, a one-eyed double amputee. Narrative threads originally independent of each other have been integrated into one continuous story line.

Wabi, Tamago, Minaki, Taka and various secondary characters are entirely new to this version. inch foot time gem was missing them.

It often takes a long time for the true form of a play to be disclosed, even to its author.

High End Murder

2009-04-10T14:52:00.001-07:00

Impossible to understand the current economic crisis if you take it as a one-off: think of it rather as a high water mark on a crisis wave that crests and ebbs; bearing in mind that the low water mark generates more than enough ruined and outright excised lives to be gong on with. By the same token Bernie Madoff is better read less as an aberration than a very slight extrapolation from everyday commercial practice; the subprime mortgage fiasco scarcely seems less consciously fraudulent, and it appears that until almost the end, knowing his methods grew more questionable and his hopes of recovery more desperate hour upon hour, Madoff still imagined that his superior fiduciiary powers, coupled to one exceptionally luck turn of fortune's wheel would save him yet: which was the fervent prayer of the subprimers and the AIG fiasciators--now enjoying their golden handshakes--as well. (After all he had perhaps the world's largest collection of statuary bulls, nary a bear in the lot; surely that would protect and save him in a market, as everybody knows, governed by phases of the planets overhead and concentrate effusions of sympathetic magic.) And as for the Ford Pinto

--(Google this under "gas tank that explodes" if you want the full background)--

that can't be comprehended at all if regarded as an isolated incident, or even one of a firecracker string of them throughout a century and more of intense commercial history--the Dalkon Shield; Bhopal; the Three Gorges Dam; IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany on the death camps (you ever wonder why those tattooed numbers on the victims' arms? Each was matched to a stippled card with the same number in a primitive version of computerized filing.) I'll grant you IBM's crime has features that are unique. More indecent even than the collaborations of Krupp and IG Farben (now Bayer); IBM's was as great a crime against humanity, but also an act of high treason. Still, it has features in common with relatively much less extreme commercial crimes.

Nobody writing about this or the Pinto case has ever suggested that either board of directors was composed of anything but typical businessmen. I don't know if a paper trail exists from the late thirties, early forties that would show who at IBM was down with the deal, who if anyone resigned in outraged horror, but memos that came to light in the class action suit over the Pinto make it clear the executive board of Ford Motors, fully aware that they were seeding every highway in North America with car bombs, released the Pinto unmodified because it made more sense on a cost/benefit analysis. A fifty cent piece of equipment they might easily ahve attached to the Pinto's volatile gas tank would have corrected the problem, but they would have had to put up the price about a dollar, or absorb an infinitesimal reduction in profit on each auto sold. Add it all up car by car that's a lot of bucks; two hundred thou per wrongful death suit is what accountants tell them insurance settlements are going for and hey! that works out cheaper. What kind of system so easily and reflexively performs cost/benefit analysis on the merits of murdering random strangers in cold blood? How many? Eight hundred is the lowball estimate.

How many of the most depraved serial killers on death row (in the U.S. states that still maintain it) would you need to assemble in a room until confirmed kills among the lot would total eight hundred? The bloodiest hundred fifty cover that spread? Almost certainly double that number, you'd be down from the eight-ten range to triple, double and onetime murderers long before they added up to such a sum.So why do people who are rabid for the death penalty concentrate so exclusively on such comparative small fry. A CEO and twelve or fourteen presidents and vices round a table conspire to murder eight hundred people and the only sanctions called upon are economic ones. They lost that lawsuit big time, paid out way more than $200,000/wrongful death. That'll teach 'em.

Alas, I'm pretty much an absolute opponent of the death penalty, and besides in this case its woeful inadequacy is plainly to be seen. How many times can you effectively execute any one murderer? Once remains pretty much the upward limit in spite of the dazzling technological advances we've seen in so many areas of our lives. Even if the means existed to spark life back into a corpse so you could execute again, 800 executions would ultimately be not only sickening but way monotonous. Even assigning a value of twenty-forty murders per board member, poking in that many successive lethal needles would surely prove ultimately as tedious as assembly line work. So by the law of an eye for an eye, strict retributive justice must remain a perpetually elusive goal. And I did think the money settlement, humungous as it was by the standard of its day, was rather a timid slap on the wrist. What settlement then might have seen rough justice done and, more importantly, allowed good to win out in glory at last?

What if instead of a huge but inadequate (and for a corporation the size of Ford, fairly easily assimilable) money settlement, or better yet along with it, the defendants had been stripped of their stocks in Ford Motors and the class action plaintiffs, in equal shares, invested with them? appointing a new board of directors from among their own number and taking over management of the company completely.

I'm not sure this wouldn't be a wise thing to attempt everywhere in the corporate world, certainly in every failing or failed institution where people whose corruption, incompetence or both has bred chaos, insolvency and a begging bowl mentality on a global scale. Do you seriously think people randomly plucked off any street corner wouldn't handle things better than these self-inflated, overpriced frauds and financial know-nothings? Me, I seriously wonder if children randomly plucked from a playground could possibly misperform as badly.

How many people died of Madoff's scams? Not just ruined lives, pensioners with their savings wiped out joining the line at job fairs to seek entry level positions at McD's (rain forest assassin) in their golden years, but actual deaths directly traceable to sudden catastrophic plunges in the net worth of charities invested with him whose work literally spelt the difference between life and death in many cases? I don't know if it would be possible to calculate, but in spite of the general hatred of Madoff--loud applause in the courtroom when he was sentenced--it's a question, as far as I know, no-one's thought even to ask. (Given the circumstances, I'm not sure I'd put the charge any higher than negligent homicide in his case. But that much at least, justice should insist on.) With the exception of mob hits and killings associated with large inheritances or insurance payouts, people seem remarkable little inclined even to speak the word when it comes to murder visibly linked to commercial gain. Too brutal a word for most of us perhaps, to associate with gentles of such majestically hoarded wealth. The indisputable common denominator among those on death row in all but a statistically negligible number of cases is not that they've committed a murder--dubious prosecution methods cast doubt on how fairly that issue was decided in too many cases; I'm grateful that in the numerous cases in Canada where we've discovered a wrongful conviction, we've been able to restore justice partiallly by releasing the wrongly convicted, rather than speak useless words of apology to a headstone. No, what they have in common almost universally is that they're poor. Where the rich are convicted of murder they serve out terms in prison, and no-one's ever convicted of murder if it's carried out in the interest of a corporate bottom line.

Politics and the English Language

2009-03-03T18:32:00.001-08:00

Orwell: All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

In a column on the most famous essay included in this new volume, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) Robert Fulford drops the rather original suggestion that Orwell's failure to notice Churchill's splendid wartime speeches--in an essay eplicitly devoted to rigorous analysis of double talk and obfuscation in the political rhetoric of his day--was a proof of Orwell's reverse snobbery. Que?

Truth is you could make a pretty good case for Orwell as both a snob and a reverse snob on the basis of any number of things he actually wrote. (Perhaps he was simply being narrowly self-consistent--his upbringing was shabby-genteel, either lower-upper or upper-lower class depending your pov--which afforded ample room to despise the true lower and true upper classes both.) But to argue he was expressing contempt for Churchill by not winkling him into an essay he couldn't have fit into logically--what possibly is the point? He wrote enough words actually about Churchill--admiring and critical both--if that's your litmus test for his response to the upper classes. What would he have accomplished by heaping praise on Churchill as a master political rhetorician in an essay otherwise completely taken up with negative examples? taken it down a blind alley for a paragraph or two before it to its proper course? And how could he possibly have praised Chruchill fulsomely enough to satisfy Rob, 63 years later?

'Most important, the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's.
' In the hands [sic] of Winston Churchill, language ralllied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times.
'How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of England's existence?'

--Robert Fulford, NatPost Mar 3, 2009

If this hyperbolic gush acknowledges Churchill's role in defeating Hitler, it's hard to imagine what Orwell or anyone, writing at the time with nothing but facts to go on, could have written that wouldn't have struck Fulford as grossly inadequate recognition. Did Churchill's speeches galvanize? yes. Were they the sole force that did? no, though they were a key focal one. At the base level what galvanized the British was simple recognition that Nazism was anti-human and a danger to life and alll human liberty. Was British resistance to Hitler crucial? yes. Was it sufficient? no, anymore than Churchill's language was sufficient in itself to defeat Germany's war machine. Troops moving over air, sea and land were also required, and support troops supplying them in a thousand areas. And they were galvanized, not hypnotically and zombifically driven, by Churchill's powerful rhetoric, and obliged to make complex decisions day by day, hour by hour, that Churchill's speeches could give them no specific guidance on. Some of the credit for their actions--my mother's and father's among the rest--belongs to them as free agents; they weren't simply windup dolls driven forward by a master rhetorician's impulsion. Churchill would have been repulsed by that suggestion, and so should every free citizen.

In one of his essays or columns during the war Orwell spoke of a most-probably-apocryphal story going round about one of Churchill's most famous speeches: ". . . we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” It was widely rumoured that when he went off mike he added, "We'll throw bottles at the bastards, we've got nothing else." Orwell thought, rightly I'd say, that for such a story to circulate was a strong indication the depth and breadth of affection there was for Churchill, across all class lines. Even more interesting is how stark a topper it is, and what ferocity of resistance it utters. Churchill felt that impulse and fed it, but he didn't originate it: it came from a wider place than any individual, great or small, could occupy alone.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-02-27T19:17:00.000-08:00

I don't often feel huge enthusiasm for the film that wins best picture at the Oscars. They seem to me mostly such timid and compromised choices. I'm rarely quite so pissed at them as I was in 1972, when I thought it scandolous that The Ruling Class didn't swep every major category. Best adapted screenplay? There certainly wasn't one that year--few any year--so brilliant and incisive as Peter Barnes' adaptation of his own stage play--just as there've been few plays in English that come close to the wit intelligence emotional-philosophical range of The Ruling Class--and five at least of those that did were written by Peter Barnes. (A couple were even written by Shakespeare.) Best lead actress? Coral Browne, hands down. Lead actor? Peter O'Toole. Supporting actress? Carolyn Seymour. Supporting actor--Alastair Sim and Arthur Lowe would have to duke that one out. Direction? Editing? Soundtrack? Cinematrography? Set design, costume design? Nothing else that year came anywhere near The Ruling Class in any of these categories and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. But I was angry at a larger injustice than an Academy snub: the loss to a wide popular audience of a genuinely great popular classic.

The Ruling Class had been too weak a draw at the box office to drum up much Academy buzz, and why is a puzzler. Indifferent promotion's the culprit I suspect, by movie executives who had no clue the film's merits--made it at O'Toole's insistence in exchange for his agreement to play the lead in Man of La Mancha. You tell me: was A Clockwork Orange a huge hit? Was Life of Brian? why shouldn't The Ruling Class have been, since it fuses the virtues of both?

Slumdog Millionaire didn't evade the same fate by much. It was slated to go straight to video when a People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (my home town, yay!) got the money boys thinking they might have a viable property on their hands after all. Good that this time around a truly splendid popular entertainment has its chance, a film whose intelligence is not whittled away by compromises aimed at mass acceptance, but amplified by its wide-ranging appeal. Big pictures like Dark Knight or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button almost never have that kind of potency.

Then again some of the people I've been chatting with virtually think Slumdog Millionaire is a big picture masquerading as a small one. The helicopter scene is cited. Here it might come down to your definition of big and small. Through most of the history of movies, $15,000,000 would have been a very big budget indeed, and as recently as fifteen years ago I think it would still have been a mid-sized one. And of course it's still possible to make a film for much less if all involved tighten their belts, defer their salaries and bring their own lunches along. Maybe The Wrestler was made for less, but every other best picture nominee cost more, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cost ten times as much. (Way more money for sure than ever got out through FEMA for relief of Katrina victims.) And there's this: the entire cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire attended the Oscars. I think they took up roughly a single row of seats. What secondary hall would you have hired to seat everybody else if the entire Benjamin Button cast and crew had turned up? Slumdog aims at epic proportions, which necessitates a certain bigness of frame and scope; but it's always resolutely on a human scale.

Somebody else communicating cross-continentally said he had no interst in seeing "feel good shit" like Slumdog Millionaire. I won't presume to guess what he'll think of the film if he ever does get round to seeing it, but if he still dislikes it he'll have to modify his reasons. "Feelgood shit" has as near as it can come to no emotional range, that would be too unsettling; it doesn't take you on a propulsive roller coaster ride, and it certainly never ends with a disturbing fusion of tragedy and triumph. (The best fairy tales, on the other hand, often do, which is why I have no quarrel with people who call Slumdog Millionaire a fairy tale, unless they mean it derisively. "Just a fairy tale"--why do people say things as silly as that? They never say a story is "just a tragedy," "just an epic" or "just a magic-realist fable". And what, pray tell, is a magic-realist fable when it's at home? a fairy tale. What's the difference between a flutist and a flautist? $50,000 a year.)

I admit to being of two minds about the film's title. I like the classic purity of Q & A, the title of the novel it's based on; but would enough people have lined up to see a film called Q & A for it to win a Peoples Choice Award at TIFF? And the in-your-face quality of the title the filmmakers settled on has its appeal: we're dogs, we're scum, we're from the slum, but you who'd sell your nearest and dearest for some additional cash, we can out-think you any day of the week.

No theme's more richly explored in the movie than the global economy and its frenzies; its easy cohabitation with the gangster element; the uneasy points of comparison between gangsters and the respectably wealthy (Maman who captures stray orphans to set loose in the city as beggars, blinding the sweetest singing ones so they'll fetch more from sentimental passersby, is the psychological twin of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? host Prem Kumar, which is why Jamal with his experience of Maman knows Kumar's offer of help on the ten million rupee question can't be trusted); the empty towering shells it erects and sheathes for quicky mass housing. But the main critique of a money obsessed ethic in Slumdog Millionaire is the lead character Jamal, the film's calm intelligent centre, who apart from what's necessary for survival has zero interest in money. He's known for months if not years how to become a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but only uses that knowledge as a last ditch measure to reach, in the battlement tower where she's imprisoned, his lost love.

I don't often feel like climbing on the bandwagon for an Oscar pick, but it's the rare rule that isn't sometimes best observed by breaking it.

25 Random Things

2009-02-08T09:07:00.001-08:00

1. I have no intention of telling you 25 random things about myself. On the other hand. . .
2. Approached as a compositional idea, it has a certain temptation. . . which is a major revelation about how I approach the creative act of writing.
3. I try not to repeat myself too much because I'm easily bored.
4. Also I find that if you repeat something for emphasis or to make a point, it often has the opposite effect: either each repetition diminishes the impact, or the point being made is obscured by the reader's attempt to look for a hidden meaning.
5. If I remember, I roll my socks in pairs when they come out of the dryer. If I don't, which is often the case, in the morning I'm trying to find two matching black socks in the dark, not wanting to wake Marysia an hour earlier than she has to get up.
6. I get up an hour earlier than I strictly need to because it's a good time to catch up with work on the computer.
7. I wake up in the middle of the night with story ideas, perhaps direct from my dreams to me. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I get up and write out at least a beginning.
8. I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still can't understand, except as an index of his pretentiousness, a maven of the National Post. lamenting the triumph of trash culture, whose crescendo argument at the end was that scholars write studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They write studies of The Brothers Karamazov too, what's your point?
9. I like both shaggy dogs and shaggy dog stories.
10. If I had any brains I'd be an idiot, they seem to get all the best jobs.
11. I've thought for years the fundamental unit of meaning in language is not the word but the rhythm, or more precisely the breath. Same in all the other arts really. If a research facility offered me a huge sum to study this for a year or two I'd produce some interesting results.
12. The fundamental unit of all artistic expression really.
13. Of all expression in life, even conversation.
14. I've been known to worry at the thread of an argument an inordinate length of time.
15. At least I don't have any red socks in my drawer. Two black socks, people have to examine the patterns pretty close to know they don't match, and even in the dark I can tell which of my socks are white.
16. I wonder how entropy really
17. I sometimes wish I'd been born in a different galaxy. The trick would be discovering just the right one, with a site available for live births.
18. Is a question ever a random fact?
19. I know how to count but putting the numbers right there on the side helps keep track for sure. Very few people could keep count while speaking 19 consecutive sentences, and I'm certainly not one of them.
20. I like to play slightly subversive games with formal literary exercises.
21. Even informal ones.
22. If I'd been editing Frida Kahlo's diary, I'd have put the translations of the extensive text on facing pages instead of at the back of the book. As it is you have to flip back and forth too much, unless your Spanish is tip top, and the whole point of these illustrated pages overgrown with jungle thickets of text is that you should be reacting to the images and the words simultaneously. Somebody else would have to do the translaation.
23. I have my suspicions about the Universe. I think it may be a collective noun to which no collective unity can be ascribed.
24. I'm listening to Fats Waller right now. The Dadaists could have learned a thing or two from him.
25. So could just about everybody else.

Tradition Busting at the House of Lords

2009-02-02T18:31:00.000-08:00

So there's a plan afoot to reform the British House of Lords by ousting members convicted of felonies:

"A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: 'In the House of Commons, if you break the criminal law or, for example, it's found that although you haven't broken the criminal law you've been doing something completely improper then the House of Commons can, in extremis, expell you. We're saying that most apply, too, to the House of Lords also."

--Julia Belluz, London Feb 2 '09
(Special to the Globe and Mail)

Dangerous, precedent-shattering idea! Pretty much violates every tradition on which the House of Lords is founded. Those Nobles who don't owe their titles and estates to appropriations from the looting and sacking of monasteries in Henry VIII's time owe it to the pillage and plunder of an entire nation by William the Waster (Alasdair Gray's more apt name for the king usually styled William the Conqueror); or to some lesser episode in the gleefully kleptomanic history of the nobly armed and wealthy. True, there are titled families that have kept their noses clean since, sometimes for as much as a century at a time, and they're to be commended for the fresh spirit of innovation they embody. The trouble is these titles are hereditary. Strip a fourteenth, seventeenth or nineteenth century Lord of title for crimes against humanity, you've pretty much stripped the current Lord of the same title. What to do with a House of Parliament suddenly bereft of Members? Make a jazzy site for a commercial mall. Dibs on the Starbucks site eh?

Link to Story

2009-01-31T07:22:00.000-08:00

dogpressclicky

Baudolino

2009-01-28T18:45:00.001-08:00

Baudolino, Umberto Eco

The story of a peasant who rises to power when he's taken under the wing of Frederick Barbarossa, adopted in all but name.

A story full of inextricable ambiguities because Baudolino's special talent is to lie persuasively, and he constructs a tapestry of complex, involuted lies, mostly concerning the dazzling kingdom of Pester John to the East, which is already part of the mythic fabric of Europe. Therefore he and four collaborators who help build up the story half believe it already, and come to believe it more the more they fill in the outline and the shape in detail--the shape of a perfect kingdom and therefore impossible for imperfect men to conceive unless it really exists. So Baudolino, inflamed with a passion to journey there, infects Barbarossa with the same desire, which--though it never brings them near Prester John's kingdom if any--radically alters Barbarossa's course in life and the destony of many his path, and sword, crosses.

Is the Crusade against Saladin he undertakes late in life decent or wise? He is far more scrupulous than some of the the thugs who've typically led crusades in the previous two centuries, but Saladin has ruled--except for these bloody crusader wars that keep interrupting him--with a tolerably even hand over a mixed population seething at its extremes with mutual hostility. He's maintained religious tolerance--even toward Christians in spite of all these outside agitations by the tribe trying his patience. Barbarossa has some of the same qualities except for a tendency to fall into indiscriminate--all right, semi-discriminate--massacre when he feels his will has been too grievously crossed. Should he conquer and depose Saladin, would the people of Jerusalem consider it a fair trade? And mark this: war upon Saladin isn't even his main intent, it's the pretext required to get his soldiers moving. The main purpose of his quest is to pass through to the Eastern kingdom of Prester John, to return to him the Grasal or Grail which some unscrupulous knave has abscounded with from that magnificent country.

And this Grasal is what when it's at home? The wine bowl Baudolino's father was drinking from on his deathbed, which a remark of his father persuaded Baudolino was much likelier to resemble the Grasal than the cliche gold cup encrusted with gems and lapis lazuli he'd previously conjured. And if this was likelier to be the sort of vessel Christ drank from, what then? Surely it was likelier the simple drinking bowl of a poor carpenter's son would pass down the centuries from peasant to peasant than from noble to noble? He already half believes the tale when he presents the vessel to his adoptive father. He is still more persuaded when his intimates at court, worldly nad sophisticated counsellors all, instantly believe the story he conjures. Such men would scarcely be so gulled by a transparent fraud! Net result? another holy war of dubious provenance. Humankind should at last outgrow them.

I'm not worried that this detailed account of one passage qualifies as a spoiler, because the book teems with incidents as lively and as parabolically rich. It's generally axiomatic that a book over five hundred pages, even a very fine one, will have passages that could be trimmed without conspicuous loss, but there are exceptions.

What's Your Story?

2009-01-24T11:43:00.000-08:00

It sometimes seems to me the most underestimated aspect of writing, even by writers themselves sometimes, is the story: which is the whole package.

I recollect a conversation, some years ago, with a rather gifted poet about Mark Twain. I was informed that Mark Twain "of course" was chiefly important as a political satirist. I said he was also a great spinner of tall tales--by which I meant the kind of exuberant flights of fancy you encounter fairly often in his work, which go a long way to disproving his own contention that there's no laughter in Heaven. This was dismissed with a wave of the hand, and the curious thing is the poet, in conversation, was and is a rather gifted talespinner himself.

Clamours to make certain every story emphasizes one aspect of the mix--political opinion, social conviction, psychological insight--strike me as off the main point. All of those, like effective grammar,coherent syntax, language rhythm, a fine balance between laconic stance and wild rhetorical hyperbole--are elements that contribute, ingredients in the mix. Some are more centrally important than others. Good luck trying to convey a psychological insight in a sentence whose rhythm's so clunky it can't be read aloud with effective emphasis and thus can't be heard by the inner ear of the silent reader either. You'll have plenty of company--that's the style of most textbook psychology--but the game's not worth the candle.

The opinions, convictions, insights we carry along with us in life can't actually be left out of the stories we tell--it's not physically possible. If they arise naturally from a story's context there's a mutual enrichment; if they're winkled in at every moment whether opportune or not, they deform and in the worst case destroy any story so afflicted. (See any of Ayn Rand's dreadful anti-novels, in which her convictions are so apparent that the heroes and villains speak with one voice, the heroes exposing the villains' villainies and the villains, with exactly the same arguments, exposing their own. Nobody who's never sympathized with an opposing point of view should ever try writing a story or--handling heavy machinery I suppose.)

Opinions that cut across the grain of a story don't simply work against the story: they work against themselves. As far as stories are able to persuade, it's the ideas that arise from the experience of them that stick, and can subtly alter perception. Nothings easier to see and dodge in a story than an incoming sermonette. Perhaps the key reason is that ideas which can be so imposed must be firm and fixed, and it's impossible to change minds with an inert idea. The change may be subtle, but if a story of substantial length doesn't discernibly change the writer telling it, it's already failed its first reader and will fail the rest.

New Orleans

2009-01-22T17:51:00.000-08:00

The little Bush deconstruction piece I wrote the other day has got me thinking again about that great city. In one of his last interviews Mailer said there are any number of great American cities--Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A. "if you insist"--but only one world city: New York. He was obviously forgetting New Orleans, but I can't blame him for that. I was too until just now.

What an extraordinary cauldron of cultures, what an amazing greenhouse of hybrid growth New Orleans has been throughout its history! When Walker Percy modestly claimed that his home city had produced no native genius, I thought maybe he was simply too close to its culture to see. I'm sure you could refute this claim at length with extensive examples, but two words are enough for me. In an interview once, John Lennon said "if there's such a thing as a genius, I'm one," and I mean not the slightest disrespect to the Beatles when I say that goes about quadruple for Louis Armstrong.

It's probable that Armstrong is New Orleans' greatest son by a considerable distance--does anyone else so entirely embody the spirit of the city? He was a master of most of its entertainment and musical styles--don't hear much zydeco in his work, but don't notice much else missin'. Great instrumentalist, first rate vocalist, dazzlingly inventive verbal and physical clown--dab hand as a writer too on the evidence of his autobiography Satchmo. Above all a supreme flowering of the fusion style typical of New Orleans, with its preference for strong emotional colouring and mixes of feeling and mood you wouldn't have thought coherently combinable until a strutting player with face painted white, red, cerulean blue, little dab of violet? sure, never missing a beat on an intricate quick step, shows you how it's done--always with a cool philosophical line running alongside as a guide for the perplexed. Oh sure, iti was rare that even the art of New Orleans hit and sustained those heights, but it always aspired to them, and the height of achievement according to more sombre, refined standards scarcely reaches the middle level of New Orleans' carnival/lent/jazz christening jazz wedding jazz funeral aesthetic.

Some of what I've been reading suggests New Orleans is experiencing a diaspora--a mellifluous word of Greek root which can be Englished as dispersion--in the wake of Katrina, but less in consequence of the hurricane than the blowhard efforts of FEMA to rescue--the disaster apparently, since it's certainly done nothing to rescue the victims. How will New Orleans ever rebuild if so many of its displaced citizens choose not to return lest at some point in the future they suffer such a rescue again? at its best recklessly incompetent, at its worst frenzied, high partying kleptomaniac.

(I don't mean to suggest nobody doing good work was connected with official relief efforts in New Orleans and Louisiana generally--I'm sure, among the NGOs especially, there were and are pockets of serious dedication. It's the overall effort, particularly at the highest reaches of patrician accountability, that has sucked worse than the vortex of force at a hurricane's ferocious apex.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that New Orleans natives and expats like Dr John and Harry Coninck Jr. have abandoned or failed their city. If exemplary reconstruction work's going on, they're at the heart of it. So are a number of her spiritual children--who are? oh, every serious artist in North America for a start. Some of us are able to do little but send our hopes and, those of us so inclined, prayers her way, but we know what we owe one of the world's great capitals of the human spirit.)

Bush's Parting Note to Obama

2009-01-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

Bush's Parting Note to Obama

Watch out for the press. Sooner or later they'll misunderestimate you too.
That's one fine economic downturn you'll be facing hee hee.
Just in case, maybe take electrocution lessons. It's important for a President to always speak good.
None of my cabinet or staff have been able to tell me and I've asked them all, but maybe you know--do the French even have a word for entrepreneur?
Don't be afraid to impose democracy by force in Afghanistan the same way we did in Iraq. It may not win us any popularity contests but it's what America does best.
Don't try to fool all the people all the time unless it's needed for national security and those precious liberties we most hold dear. Don't be too apprised if even then it doesn't work out.
Lincoln's shoes are big ones to fill. I know because I saw them in a museum once. They aren't quite as big as they look on his statue though.
If a hurricane strikes on your watch and you want to throw a rescue party--make sure somebody actually gets rescued or you'll never hear the end of it. Not only that but however perfect the cash flow is, they'll look at the human toll and call the whole operation a failure. Is that fair? dwelling on a minor aspect that didn't pan out so well and ignoring entirely the big picture of fiscal success? Well let me tell you life ain't fair and that goes double for Presidents.
A lot of criticizing's flawed under the bridge while I was President, but nobody ever said I destablerized everything I ever touched with my hands. Once in a while you can fool all the people.
Bear in mind as I always did the wise premonition of Lincoln, and always try to redress the better angles of humans and nature.
When the going gets tough, it's a good time for somebody else to step up to the plate. Here's wishing you a good eye and a high batting average.
When you do leave Iraq, don't forget to turn the lights off.

Lung Cancer Research Donation

2009-01-18T11:42:00.000-08:00

This letter was sent out in a writer's workshop I participate in by the wife of a colleague and friend in the office who's been dealing for some years with Lung Cancer:

January 9, 2009

Dear friends,

As you are aware, I have been "living" with cancer for the past 5+ years. Through this journey, I have met some wonderful people. A while back I met Mike Stevens who is directly involved with LUNGevity. He and his wife, Susan, are in charge of organizing the walk in San Diego. He encouraged me look into LUNGevity and consider forming a team for the Breath of Hope San Diego Lung Cancer Walk. So that's what I've done!

With my recent decline, I may not be able to participate in the actual walk, but I'm very excited about forming "Pamela's Pals" to help raise funds and awareness for lung cancer research. The event will be held on Sunday, March 8, 2009, with registration starting at 8:00 a.m.

You may donate directly by making your check payable to: LUNGevity Foundation, and then send it to me @:
11121 Madrigal Street
San Diego, CA 92129-1213
or, go to my Website by clicking the link at the bottom of this page where you can donate directly.

Do you know that lung cancer kills more Americans each year than breast, prostate, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers combined?

Every dollar that you contribute to the LUNGevity Foundation brings us one step closer to finding a cure for lung cancer. In fact, due to LUNGevity's unique relationship with our partner organizations that requires them to match our research funding, each dollar that LUNGevity grants will fund more than $1.25 of the most promising research at the top research facilities.

Thank you for considering participating in my goal to raise $5,000. Every step we take will bring us one step closer to finding a cure for lung cancer!

With hope and appreciation,

Pamela F. Hill

Pamela’s Pals
http://events.lungevity.org/site/TR/WalkFunRun/General?px=1275721&pg=personal&fr_id=1370

Two people close to me have died of lung cancer: my mother at the fairly advanced age of 83, and the finest teacher I ever encountered in my years at school and University, Professor L.J. (Roy) Morrissey, at 53. This death was unquestionably untimely, but was my mother's as well? People on her side of the family frequently lived into their nineties. Her favourite aunt died of a heart attack at 96, on the bus that was taking her home after she'd bought two bags of groceries at the market.

Roy never smoked, and my mother was a smoker for quite a few years but quit in her late forties (when I was still in High School). "Not soon enough" she said once in her last weeks in palliative care, but it's not generally thought that a cancer whose origin is in smoking can remain dormant in the system over decades.

The main reason for mentioning this is the widespread assumption that lung cancer is overwhelmingly a consequence of poor lifestyle choice. Actually lung cancer is often the result of pollutants in the environment that none of us can completely avoid, but breast cancer research (for example) is easier to solicit donations for because of the assumption its victims are comparatively blameless. There's another reason I think, that operates on men and women both, but a little differently on each: the lungs aren't a visible, much less a highly ornamental part of the anatomy. They're crucial to life however in a way the breasts are not, and even crucial to the health and beauty of the body in all its parts. There can hardly be a more worthy organ to support and sustain through dollars for research and treatment.

-----------------------

The Great Game: Review

2009-01-16T19:05:00.000-08:00

{The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage
Frederick P. Hitz}

The Great Game: Review

There's a good deal of interest in this comparative analysis of spying as it appears in fiction and reality--Frederick P. Hitz had a long history of service in the CIA and the State Department, so he's able to speak as a knowledgeable insider. But is there something in the nature of secret service work that obliges its practitioners to wear blinders in perpetuity? even long after their official career terminates? It's not that Frederick HItz never touches on a moral issue related to the tradecraft of spying: it's that auxiliary questions seem to preoccupy him to the exclusion of fundamental ones.

It seems clear enough, by the length and detail of the list he compiles if nothing else, that he's unhappy with the many incursions by U.S. intelligence on the rights of its citizens--the buggings, long files on protestors and activists (the length and fanatically schematic detail providing one operative definition of anal retentive thinking), the whole wackily paranoid surveillance drill--that finally so outraged Congress that they demanded direct oversight of intelligence operations. What mainly troubles him however is a consequence of Congressional oversight that nags at his conscience to this day, that it forced the CIA to abandon its contra allies in the covert war against the government of Nicaragua. Forgive me if I point out that there are at least three ethical questions raised by the Iran-Contra business that are far more pertinent and central: 1) why was U.S. intelligence aiding and abetting such an army of rapacious thugs in the first place? 2) what excuse did they have for conniving at the military overthrow of a democratically elected government? 3) did it occur to anyone involved in the drug and gun running operations that financed this dirty caper, that the blowback from those deals would string corpses link by link in an ongoing chain from that day to this present one and beyond? or was that thought of secondary relevance compared to such a golden shot at abridging the freedoms of a sovereign state?

Nowhere is this blindered approach more evident, perhaps, than in Hitz' assessment of 911:

"Successful espionage is impossible without tight operational security.
The events of September 11, 2001, underscore this admonition. There were nineteen Arab men who hijacked the aircraft that struck the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and crashed in the field near Shankstown, Pennsylvania. They were professionals, for the most part, without previous terrorist involvement, from so-called moderate Arab allies of the United States, i.e., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. They maintained tight operational discipline over a long period preparatory to the attacks. Some of them lived in the United States with their families during the two years prior to 9/11, keeping to themselves, going to flight school, and nobody came forward to report any suspicious behavior. It is still unclear whether all of them knew that their 9/11 mission entailed suicide, but they were remarkably discreet in their movements, and the organization that funded their preparations was highly sophisticated."
--p 72

'Discreet' wouldn't be my adjective of choice to describe somebody who prepares for a suicide mission by taking flight lessons and tells instructors he only needs to learn how to take a plane up, he doesn't need to learn how to land it. Frugal maybe, but discreet no. That this wasn't red flagged was no fault of U.S. domestic intelligence; the blame here rests solely on the insufficient intelligence, curiosity or sense of civic responsibility of whoever shrgged and booked these truncate lessons. But why does Hitz skip over completely what's become common knowledge since: that intelligence of an upcoming attack of major importance was circulating months before the event, which might have been prevented if these early warnings had been properly investigated. They weren't, primarily it seems because of rivalries between competing intelligence agencies. More importantly, there's an extensive backstory to this Al Qaeda operation which once again is silently overlooked, so that there's no possibility of attending to its lesson.

How far back Al Qaeda goes as an organization I don't know, but surely the point at which its power, presitge and visibility on the world stage received its biggest spike (before 911) was during the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, when they and the Taliban fought as allies alongside U.S. military and intelligence forces. Whether any Al Qaeda (or Mujahadeen who later graduated to positions in Al Qaeda) were actually flown to Langley for training in guerilla warfare and covert ops, they were certainly trained and armed by the CIA and the Pentagon, and heavily financed by the U.S. state department. Taliban rule in Afghanistan was a direct consequence of their participation in that war. Two wars being fought today at a huge cost in human life and other irreplaceables is only the most prominent and visible consequence of that long-ago alliance. It's probable Al Qaeda would never have grown to an organization capable of the Twin Tower attack without the seminal education of those early fighting years. And why was the war in Afghanistan fought?

Zbigniew Brzezinski was fond of boasting, once upon a time, that he set an Afghan trap for the Soviet Union. This was probably a considerable oversimplification and aggrandisement of his personal role, and I've no doubt the Soviets had their own bad reasons for making no effort to avoid war there. I do notice he's toned down such claims of late--perhaps afraid that awakening interest in Afghan ancient history would lead to too much inquiry, and affix firmly to his back the word debacle? (At best, I can think of far uglier words than that you could apply to starting a war whose ultimate toll was a million dead to get up the nose of a geopolitical rival. That a human being with beating heart and functioning breath could (even if he was hyperbolizing) boast of such an achievement is enough to make a body wonder if he wasn't overhasty rejecting his childhood belief in the existence of a literal devil.)

The reason all this matters is that many people still with considerable power and influence saw no possible downside in boosting the might and educating the coarse killing sensibilities of Al Qaeda if Al Qaeda could direct its force against Soviet Russia, over the bloody proving ground of Afghanistan, with none too much care taken of its civilian population, which has proved not only an evilly cynical but a hugely impractical calculation. New people coming up, hand picked by these genii of disaster, tend to mirror the attitudes that breed these results. Spy tradecraft is littered through its whole history with calculations of this kind, which are typically displayed as badges of superior ability to live in 'the real world'--but subject them to a shred of logical analysis and see if you can find one single point at which they differ structurally from the ravings of the clinically insane. Kafka was the great novelist of the spy genre--or maybe Lewis Carroll.

1 Hour With Barack Obama

2009-01-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

{This was my response to an Open Call on that theme at Open Salon}

I'd be kibitzing of course, because I'm a Canadian citizen not an American but I think I'd go bold and say "Why don't you announce the U.S. is dismantling its military apparatus and invite every nation of the earth to follow suit?" No, I wouldn't say that except as an opening gambit to get his attention, too impractical, but I would suggest he put the U.S. on the way to leading by example to a world where ultimately weapons are everywhere an obsolete relic of the past. The U.S. could considerably diminish its stockpile of nuclear and conventional weapons and its contracts for new ones without diminishing its ability to defend itself, only its ability to invade other nations. I'm assuming that's an ability Obama has less interest in than the Bushes and Clinton had.

There are many potential benefits to a serious reduction in the armament trade apart from the reduction of war's obvious harms. Everything on the social agenda, from effective green policies through health, education, welfare right down to the establishment of a truly efficient free market at home and abroad is hampered by the deforming effect of runaway military spending. Only the nation that most overextends in this area can really lead. Mr. President?

R.A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome

2009-01-07T18:54:00.001-08:00

R.A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome

Googling R.A. Lafferty the other day I found a few tantalizing excerpts from an interview he gave that I've been unable to get a look at in full as yet. In response probably to a question about the critics who say he's a better short story writer than novelist he said: "The short stories are more readable, but the novels really do say more." This statement (the last part--I find his novels just as readable as his short stories) is not only true but almost self-evident: if you're a master of multum in parvo as Lafferty is, you're not going to say at novel length only what you could say in a short story. But even Neil Gaiman, who certainly should know better, has said that Lafferty's a better short story writer than novelist I mean: Gaiman's a fine writer, particularly in the Sandman series, but I've read one of his novels, Neverwhere. It doesn't much commend his understanding of the form. Two or three fine short stories are embedded in its generally formless slop, but it's astonishing how often and easily he goes on autopilot and lets easy genre cliche take over the act of writing from him. Critics have special dispensation, they can complain about the sloppy construction of a two hour movie or a three hundred page book when they're personally incapable of a sentence whose tail end is on speaking terms with its front end, but writers ought to hold themselves to a higher standard. When Gaiman has written a book half as good as Past Master or Okla Hannali, which is to say ten times as good as Neverwhere, he might have something interesting to say about Lafferty the novelist.

Of course to say that Lafferty's novels are better than Neverwhere is to damn with criminally faint praise. I'm tolerably sure that if I had five hundred people in a lecture-hall, a reliable mike and a basket beside me filled with the collected works of both to flip through for quotes apropos, I could deliver a two hour lecture extempore on why Lafferty's as important a novelist as Dostoyevsky.And as Monty Python might put it, if you're calling Dostoyevsky an inferior novelist I shall have to ask you to step outside.

Then there's The Fall of Rome, anomalous even within his quirky oeuvre. He's written a number of historical novels, but this is more a novelized history--which is to say while he uses all the devices of a storyteller, they're secondary to the scholarship and careful sifting of evidence that an historical account demands if it's to be trusted as any close approximation to fact, and dammitall if Lafferty isn't just as fine a historian as he is a novelist and short story writer! piss you right off, such an intimidating cluster of genius level skills in a literary competitor. I console myself by reflecting that with a few notable exceptions he's no more than a serviceable poet, and so far as I know never even attempted to write plays.

The only way really to review The Fall of Rome is to give you a few generous quotes:

"This short history [Lafferty is here referring to the history, recorded in one particularly eventful chapter, within the larger history] should have something to satisfy every taste and perversion: action, treachery, fratricide and regicide, corruption, and bloodshed. It contains thirteen murders, the victims being mostly of one family. It lists the ways in which a man or an Empire may be surrounded and destroyed; and contains a veritable catalogue of subversions and finely wrought treacheries--which the reader may be able to make use of in his own life. And after this short interruption, we will return to our main action. . .

Constantine had been the last clear and absolute Emperor of all the Roman regions. Constantine was not the first Christian Emperor--that had been Philip the Arab a hundred years before--but he was the first Emperor who declared the Empire to be Christian: though he did not himself become a Christian till on his deathbed.

There were certain advantages in Constantine's advocating a Christianity for others he was not yet ready to practice himself. Nobody would question the sincerity of Constantine, but it was a sincerity that ran off in several opposite directions. He left, at his death, a rich heritage, and too many heirs.

The three sons, with their confusing and too-similar names, were to receive these territories:

Constantinus--Italy and Gaul.

Constantius--the East; that which was to become Byzantium.

Constans--Illyricum and Africa.

The territories which the two nephews, Dalmatius and Annibalianus, were to receive are not known for certain, but they are believed to have been Spain and Pannonia. This would have fragmented the Empire intolerably, but a rude sort of process was soon to simplify the holdings. These were not all the nephews--and possibly not all the sons--of Constantine, but they were the inheriting ones.

Keep your eye now on the three sons, Constantinus, Constantius, and Constans, as the shell game is played out. The three are very alike, but one of them will end up with the pea, and the others with nothing at all--not even their lives."

--pp. 61-62

"Sometime in this period Alaric did penance for forty days in reparation for his murderous raids in Greece. He was subject to remorse, for which reason he cannot be ranked among the great military leaders of the world. And in this period also, the Goths became un-Gothed to a great extent. They caught the Greek fever and discovered sudden new talents in themselves. they borrowed stringed instruments from the Greeks--they had had only horns and bull-roarers before--and went music crazy. It has been mentioned that rhyme in verse and song appeared at the turn of that century for the first time ever in the world. Nobody knew where it came from, but all the peoples took it up at the same time. The Goths made ballads in rhyme, in their own language and in Low Latin; and these became almost the signature of that rural Gothic springtime in Epirus that lasted four years.

When the impulse seized the Goths next, after martial interludes of more than five hundred years, they would be the troubadours of Languedoc in South France."

--p. 184

"Stilicho had already begun to be a little mentally deranged in those years. Though several of his most incredible feats of daring and effectiveness were still in the future, his failures had begun to appear. Some observers have claimed to see the effect of brain injury in the doughty old soldier.

The worst that can be said of him, however, is that he failed to solve certain problems that nobody else even saw. In retrospect, those problems are there clear enough. But the problems were not clear at that time; and the answers are not clear now. Stilicho was the only one who perceived that there were mortal dangers beneath the surface changes.

There were the affairs of soldiers; the affairs of governors; the affairs of Provinces. There were changes of jurisdiction and certain alterations of administration; there were settlements and resettlements; and there were the deaths and resurrections of certain countrysides. Old men were being replaced by new, and the long-time trend towards centralization was being reveresed. They were times of change, but only Stilicho realized that the Empire was dying in the changes; and only he cared.

It may not have mattered. It may be that he was wrong to care. It is only guesswork as to what sort of world it would be today if Stilicho had succeeded in his strong endeavours in those critical times. But for a weird combination of circumstances he would have succeeded. In such a case the empire would not have crashed; not, at least, in that decade and probably not in that century. Naturally, it would not have survived in the same form forever; but enough of it might have survived for a long enough time to have made a great difference.

It might not have been necessary to spend five hundred years just getting onto its feet again. It might not have been necessary to lose certain noble qualities forever. Certain institutions had to be wrought, heated and variously reshaped. Much of the furniture of the Empire was bad and outmoded. But it is possible that the house could have been cleaned without burning it down.

Nothing is inevitable till it has already happened. There, at the beginning of the fifth century, Stilicho still had a good chance of saving the Empire. For a while it seemed that he would save it, and there was undeniable improvement under his hand. The World did not have to end then."

--pp. 200-201

Ambitions

2009-01-07T17:45:00.001-08:00

I want to do everything as a writer.

I want to fuse high art and high entertainment so indivisibly that only academic morons can figure out a way to separate them into their component parts, or be bothered to.

I want to make people laugh with genuine openhearted glee and I want to make them laugh a lot when they don't feel a lot like laughing. I've no aversion to making them cry, and I certainly want to make them aware how much our structures of economy and culture are fed by an underground river of shed blood and tears. If tears are a necessary fuel of life, I want to make them tears of laughter.

I want to make people think, improbable as that may seem if they've spent twelve to twenty years in school learning not to.

I want to change the history of the world, which can't be that much more difficult than making people think.

I want to fuse logic and intuition, science and art--what the Hell were we thinking when we separated them anyway?

I want to inflame the mind, heart and conscience of my readers 'til they're so many torches lighting the way in the darkness.

At Judgment Day if there is such a thing apart from each fresh day that peeps up with the dawn, I won't be asked why I wasn't Moses, Hillel or Rabbi Zusa; Blake, Swift, Dostoyevsky or Bosch; William the Silent or Tecumseh; Hakuin or even Matt "the Magnificent" Grunewald. I'll be asked why I wasn't Martin, and I want to be able to answer "I was, as far as circumstances permitted," and prove it with examples.

I want to do what I can do, I don't want to do what could be done just as well if I weren't here.

Tell No One: Novel Into Film

2009-01-05T19:46:00.000-08:00

Tell No One: Novel into Film

I found a copy of this in the informal circulating library--leave a book, take a book--in the basement of our building, and temporarily put aside Baudolino to read it over the holidays because the French thriller adapted from it was one of the two best movies I saw last year and I'm always curious about the process of adaptation to the screen. What was retained from the original novel? What was changed? How does the impact of the two compare?

The biggest change, obviously, is moving the main action form New York to Paris, which I found on reading the novel made less difference than you might expect. A midlevel drug lord from Harlem becomes an Arab hood from a no doubt equally well known neighbourhood of Paris, but the plot, which involves big money and, therefore, global forces, is retained and here and there fine tuned.

The intricate plot is what's strongest in the novel. Characterizations seemed sharper in the film, though the basis of them was fully laid out in the novel as well. The visual style--film's equivalent of narration--is consistently swift and taut (inconsistently so in the novel, particularly it's first half; I might have had trouble getting through that if I didn't have the filmed version as a spur to reading). The visual style of the film is also beautiful in an unassuming way--finely composed images which never call undue attention to themselves. The style of the novel is at best efficient; never (as it is in Martin Cruz Smith for example) so beautiful that you stop to reread and savour a sentence or a paragraph.

I suppose it's obvious from this that I thought the changes from novel to film were improvements, but it raises an intersting question. The beauty of the film, not to mention its emotional and philosophical weight, rests on the foundation of its marvelously labyrinthine plot, which as I say comes just about completely from the novel. So how do you weigh and evaluate the respective contributions? Guillaume Canet elevated an interesting thriller into a first rate film, satisfying on all its levels, but could he have done the same starting from scratch? I know Peter Barnes, whose script was the chief reason Enchanted April was such a great film, could have written a work to equal or exceed its power without a novel to adapt, because he did more than a dozen times. But a good many film directors, even legendary ones--Kubrick for example--never made a film whose story they personally initiated. Without knowing more of Guillaume Canet's oeuvre I can't say whether he more resembles Kubrik or Peter Barnes in this, but it has got me wondering: in a collaborative medium, how much do visionaries without much talent for structure depend on people whose style might be formulaic and conventional, but whose structural sense is profound and original. And what is the relative weight of each contribution?

Here to Stay

2009-01-01T06:41:00.001-08:00

I'm listening to Freddie Hubbard. He died at the age of seventy a few days before New Year's. 'First Light' has always been the touchstone piece for me, but he made a great many fine recordings. I had to choose between two at the CD tent in back of the stage at Nathan Phillips Square last summer at the Jazz Festival, the night we were there to hear Salif Keita the Golden Voice of West Africa. I was getting a Thelonius Monk as well, and a Duke Ellington/Coleman Hawkins collaboration. I wanted something by Freddie Hubbard but I couldn't afford two more CDs and wanted the clerk to tell me: which of these two? He gave an "I only work here" shrug. A white haired black gentleman, very robust but in his seventies or older I'd guess by the fine mapwork of wrinkles on his face, took the two out of my hands, looked at them less than a second and handed me the one I'm playing now. Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Wayne Shorter; tenor saxophone; Cedar Walton, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums. HERE TO STAY.

Year in Review

2008-12-27T08:18:00.001-08:00

Though I'm in a fallow period right now, this has been a busy year for me as a writer. In February, I began work on a play, FIREWATCHER'S WAGES, which fulfilled a long-time ambition of mine: I've long wanted to write a play about which I could make the double boast Ben Jonson makes in the prologue to VOLPONE, the last half of which is: 'five weeks have fully penn'd it." But in some ways that was the least remarkable thing about a play that seemed to arrive from nowhere. I'd often thought about the ORESTEIA of Aeschylus, particularly the first and finest play in the trilogy, AGAMEMNON. I'd certainly often meditated on the brilliant image that dominates the first half of that play: sentinels with signal fires dotted along mountains from Troy to Argos, to alert Clytemnestra of Agamemnon's return some hours before his ships can speed their way home. I'd certainly thought often enough about the poor sod of a Herald at the beginning who's been watching, sleepless, a year for that distant mountain signal, can't they hurry up and finish the sack of Troy already? But I hadn't considered at all, before I suddenly found myself exploring them, the possibilities in a play with the Herald as its lead character, and his opening monologue in verse where did that come from? In fact everything about the play as it unfolded--the shifts from verse to proe and back, the rhythms of progressively deepening and darkening comedy scene by scene, the three original song lyrics with tunes that seemed to arrise out of the action and speech spontaneously--all of it was just about as much a surprise to me as it could be to anyone viewing or reading it.

That was only the beginning of a remarkably concentrated period of activity that lasted through mid-May. Apart from a number of flash fiction pieces, poems for the collection I was compiling, MIND MADE SYLLABLES, opinion pieces for my blog The Evitable, one full length short story, I was working, rapidly and overlapingly, on a series of theatricales: EMPTY BOWL, extensively rewritten from an earlier one act 'Zen play', inch foot time gem; LIVE PERFORMANCE, also reworking an earlier fragment (with a title so uninspiring I can't now recall it), I FORESEE TROUBLE, about a telephone psychic, and a screenplay I'd been mulling over in my mind for a little over a year, WITH A BULLET (FARGO meets the song stylings of Leonard Cohen).

You'd like these periods of sharpest inspiration to go on forever, but sadly and annoyingly, they sometimes pick the most inconvenient moments to grind to a halt. By mid-May I'd finished I FORESEE TROUBLE; LIVE PERFORMANCE was beanced and foundering, didn't know how to connect the first act to a second that was refusing to assume definite shape, partly because I was far from sure I was happy with the first act (Joss Whedon was asked to help work out problems in the 'third act' of a Hollywood blockbuster a few years back, and told the producers 'The problem with the third act is the first two acts.'); EMPTY BOWL had a first act of monumental ambition that i was mostly happy with plus two complete scenes of the second act and part of the long third scene, I thought I knew just about everything that should follow from this in Act II and III, but I wasn't writing them, only brooding day after day about the architectonics (which is a word I've always wantaed to use somewhere, but you'd be amazed how rarely an appropriate context comes up): I didn't know how to manipulate the action on the stage set as I'd devised it so it could flow and move the play forward. Irksome, especially when you consider the play was written to epic scale, with thirteen speaking parts and the need for at least that many extras to swell a fairground scene. If a play's going to be almost impossible to produce in toady's budget conscious theatre climate, is it too much to ask that it not be equally difficult to write?

WITH A BULLET was thoroughly plotted and maybe 75% written except for a necessary line-by-line overhaul, but it was difficult to bring enough concentration to bear.

A lead character in EMPTY BOWL--whose last decisive action brings the play to its close--is a poet named Wabi. Nonnie Augustine, poetry editor at the online magazine The Linnet's Wings, had read Wabi's songs (independently of their play context) in an online writer's workshop we both belonged to and asked me to submit them. So I sent them along to Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick, the overall boss editor of Linnet's Wings and with it the first act so she'd know the context in which the poems appear.

About mid-June I had a letter from Marie saying they'd like to publish both the poems and the act I'd sent them. Agreeing to this I began proofreading PDF pages and typing into my own file the scenes from Act II I realized I hadn't got around to putting in yet, and discovered I'd worked out the problem I'd had which kept me from finishing. In about two weeks I'd completed Act II and III--which combined are slightlly shorter than Act I by itself, you'd likely play it with just the one intermission should anyone (and the sooner the better) choose to do so. Conscious that the immediate prod for finishing the play had been Marie's letter, I wrote to offer her the whole play if she wanted it, if it didn't seem too big a page-gobbler for one issue; which is how my largest publication to date, and my first full-length play publication, came about.

Though I was still writing the odd flash fiction piece, and one more full length story in the period between mid-May and June, the late June-early July completion of EMPTY BOWL was my largest sustained effort then and for a while to come. Brooding about WITH A BULLET--planning to work it out seriously during a week's holdiay in the sand dunes around Bellfontaine in late July-early August. I was already feeling looser and more creative on the drive up--wrote a complete ten minute play, 'Please May I Live?'--except for a little fine tuning later, strted and finished on the five hour drive.

At the cottage I got to work on the logistics and even ballistics of WITH A BULLET. Hours of free time stretching out before me, I'd sit in a butterfly chair with clutters of draft pages and compile, compose, revise. On the way back into the city it was finished and ready to type into files.

That was my last powerfully sustained burst of creativity this year. I worte a fair number of flash fiction pieces in August and September and a diminishing number, sometimes fewer than one a week, since. I've been mainly occupied with sending out playscripts to theatre companies and stories and poems to magazines that accept email submissions. Finally a way of sending out manuscripts that my budget can always accomodate.

Apart from EMPTY BOWL, The Linnet's Wings (www.thelinnetswings.net) has published an essay I never expected to see in 'print' (and there are plans to publish physical copies beginning with that issue, so--fingers crossed--I may even see it in PRINT) I AM BEING EVERYBODY THEY CRIED, an essay on the work of Peter Barnes, the greatest playwright for the stage in the English language in the 20th Century. There's been a delay in a 'day calendar' anthology of flash fiction pieces, 366 stories each on a single page of which six are mine, and the same editor is still in process of organizing an animated anthology which will feature the animated version of one of my short stories, 'Who Was That?' Next year perhaps, one of the two dozen or so theatre companies who currently have one or another of my plays in their submission files will decide to be the first to premiere one of them onstage. Ideally two or three at once, each with a different play. Might rack up serious frequent flier miles if I were expected to attend at each. I'm not holding my breath--I've discovered that's a dangerous thing to do in the writing trade.

Harper & the Coalition

2008-12-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

{I wrote this to my neice in response to a couple of letters cheerleading the coalition from her current residence in Brussels}:

Ula,

You'll have heard by now I imagine that Stephen Harper's dodged the bullet for the time being with a prorogation of the House. If you want to catch up with debate on this subject over here, check out CBC.ca and The Globe and Mail website for Ed Broadbent's comments (and Rick Salutin's in the Globe as well). And definitely check out Rick Mercer's latest Rant on rickmercer.com. All our national news sources are worth googling on this subject. I've been reading the three Toronto dailies just to keep up with who's saying what.

The National Post, curiously enough, has little to say in defence of Harper--loads to say against the (potential) Coalition on the other hand. Lorne Gunter seems to tacitly approve Harper's attempt to bankrupt the Opposition parties, but even his comment seems mainly aimed at the (potential) Coalition, who he accuses of avoiding confrontation on matters of principle throughout the previous Harper government, only to finally stand up on their haunches and protest when their funding was endangered. considering how much Harper got away with by bluff and bluster in the last parliament, Gunter has a point, but the more cogent point is that voter representative funding was intended to replace large donations to political parties by private interests, and somewhat has. (I'm not up on the ins and outs, but I seriously doubt either private interests or political parties have entirely divested themselves of loopholes.) The key point is that it was a democratizing influence, and the secondary point is that the recent election has drained every party's coffers. the party in power gains a huge advantage over parties stripped of this entitlement: Mercer's not being the least bit alarmist when he says the only tendency of a move like that is toward a one party state. I wouldn't want the NDP or the Green party in power under those terms, because no party whatever its principles can be counted on to act well without strict democratic oversight. Giving that kind of power to Harper and that group of thieves he has in cabinet--Flaherty had higher ambitions obviously than merely fleecing the treasuries of Ontario and its chief city--now he can do the country and the capital--fuggedaboutit, giving them that kind of power would not be materially different from committing suicide. Harper's shown himself capable of doing quite enough harm without diverting an inch from his principles.

Harper's something of an anomaly in Canadian political life--apart from Mulroney he's the only Conservative Prime Minister I can think of who wouldn't be considered left of centre in the U.S. John A. MacDonald might been conservative in comparison with Laurier, but he was more radical than Lincoln--and a politician as wily as MacDonald in the U.S. mihgt have brought slavery to an end without a war. We should return to our traditions I think before we forget what they were.

All for now,
love, Uncle Martin

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Plays and Essays

2008-11-19T04:12:00.001-08:00

"If we consider how art is practiced these days, we cannot help but notice a conspicuous drive toward purity. The
artist strives toward the purely poetic, the purely lyrical, the purely epic, the purely dramatic. The painter ardently works to
create the pure painting, the musician pure music; and someone even told me that pure radio represents the synthesis
between Dionysos and Logos. What is even more remarkable for our time, which is not otherwise renowned for its purity,
is that each and everyone believes he has found his own unique and therefore the only purity. Each vestal of the arts has,
if you will, her own kind of chastity. Likewise, too numerous to count are all the theories of the theatre, of what is pur theatre,
pure tragedy, pure comedy. There are so many modern theories of the drama, what with each playwright keeping three or
four at hand, that for this reason, if for no other, I am a bit embarrassed to come along now with my own theories. . . "

--p 237, 'Problems of the Theatre'

It amazes me to realize that I've owned this book for several years and only now, when it caught my eye among a jungle thicket of books pilled everywhere, many of them on the floor, stacked in rows a little haphazard (there've been instances of toppling) where a shelf had been, and collapsed under their weight--we had clearners coming and you can't really leave books piled high on a rug that's to be cleaned, not unless you want 'em wetted and shampooed and the rug under them badly cleaned if at all, so I was stacking 'em in the closet, quite a few went into gaps on the other shelves, whatever worked basically but of course I found my fingers tripping over titles and a small pile on top of one shelf forming a to-read list, and finding the one I most wanted to reread was this Durrenmatt collection, what do I discover immediately but that I've never read in all these years the first of its two plays, Romulus the Great? Why would somebody who's an actual Durrenmatt fan overlook for so long such an unconditional masterpiece of the theatre? Sure, if I'd read it ten years ago I might barely have registered the sly theatricall allusions, to Antigone and so on though. . . could hardly have missed the farcical parody of Shakespeare's assassination scene from Julius Caesar--the action after all takes place on the ides of March, 476, but the conspirators against Rome's last Emperor Romulus aren't an organized party of citizens, they come together accidentally, each separately concealing himself and when they do come together with one intent--as Romulus alone anticipated, having planned things so they must--they're scattered at the last minute by a sudden cry: "The Teutons are coming!" (which they are, but not for another twelve hours). Like history itself, the great scenes of epic historical theatre are played the first time as tragedy, the next time as farce. (Romulus has been a completely inactive Emperor, living in retirement on an estate. His great passion has been chicken breeding, and his chickens are all named after predecessors on the Imperial throne. He eats their eggs for breakfast, and when they don't reliably lay any longer, the chickens for dinner. The previous evening it was Caligula.)

I'll stop here describing the play, since you might as well discover its qualities yourself. Don't wait as long to read it as I did.

The other play in this collection is The Visit, though I'm pretty sure from his introduction that the editor Volkmar Sander would have preferred that it be The Physicists:

"Of far greater weight and of comparable stature to The Visit, though not quite so popular. . . is [The Physicists], written in 1962"

Do you get the same feeling I do, that this is an editors indirect protest at an inclusion/exclusion imposed upon him by a publisher? For personal reasons I think it's unfortunate The Physicists wasn't included here, because I've read The Visit more than once, but i've never been able even to find a copy of The Physicists elsewhere. Not only that, the one time it's played in Toronto friends and I missed seeing it because we were too new to the city and couldn't find our way to the theatre 'til well past the first intermission. Bugger.

One of Durrenmatt's great metaphysical satires in detective novel get up, The Judge and His Hangman, is included as well, and two fascinating essays, 'Problems of the Theatre' and 'A Monster Lecture on Justice and Law'.

"We writers are often reproached with the idea that we are nihilistic. Today, of course, there does exist a nihilistic art,
but not every art that seems nihilistic is so. True nihilistic art does not appear to be nihilistic at all; it is usually considered to be
especially humane and supremely worthy of being read by our more mature young people. . . People call nihilistic what is merely
uncomfortable. People are now saying that the artist is supposed to create, not to talk; to give shape to things, not to preach.
Certainly. But it becomes more and more difficult to create 'purely' or however people imagine the creative mind should work.
Mankind today is like a reckless driver racing over faster, ever more heedlessly along the highway. And he does not like it when
the frightened passengers shout: "Watch out," and "There's a stop sign," "Slow down," or "Don't kill that child!" Moreover, the
driver hates it when someone asks who is paying for the car or who's providing the gas and oil for this mad journey, to say
nothing of what happens when he is asked to show his driver's license. After all, unpleasant facts might then come to light. . . "

--pp 259-260, "Problems of the Theatre"

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

2008-11-16T09:14:00.001-08:00

I've been reading Hemingway's complete short stories just to see if I'd been judging him too harshly all these years. It appears I haven't been judging him harshly enough. What kind of mass hypnosis are the people under who insist Hemingway innovated a lean, economical style--'the Iceberg style', which was named 'multum in parvo' in Ancient Rome and described a style thousands of years old even then? 'A Reader Writes' is one and three quarter pages long, and only the letter embedded in it is necessary to tell the story; the frame device is a laborious description of the letter writer deciding to write to an advice columnist in the newspaper, followed by an even more laborious account of her thoughts after writing the letter, none of which adds anything to the thought process already revealed in the letter. It would be a slight enough story even at half a page, but that's its correct length, and it's typical of the percentagest in more serious, and lengthier, stories such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. On average his best stories are about twice as long as they should be if his aim is any degree of concision.

I'll grant you though that it's hard to say in some cases how much overwritten a story is because his other consuming vice, a persistent mislaying of tone and emphasis, makes it difficult to know what was intended, and therefore what the natural length of the story might have been. 'A Natural History of the Dead' starts out promising, and might have turned out remarkable if he'd kept to his initial idea--describing the battlefields he's witnessed from the laconic, emotionless perspective of a scientist, a satiric technique that if well handled produces a mood the opposite of detachment (see Swift's A Modest Proposal). Alas, unlike Swift, Hemingway is concerned to make it impossible for literal-minded readers to think badly of him as coldblooded, so he keeps breaking in with sentimental effusions. The flaccid floundering this occasions is not pretty to watch:

"Most of those mules that I saw dead were along mountain roads or lying at the foot of steep declivities whence they had been pushed to rid the road of their encumbrance. They seemed a fitting enough sight in the mountains where one is accustomed to their presence and looked less incongruous there than they did later, at Smyrna, where the Greeks broke the legs of all their baggage animals and pushed them off the quay into the shallow water to drown. The numbers of broken-legged mules and horses drowning in the shallow water called for a Goya to depict them. Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say that they called for a Goya, since there has been only one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight but, more likely, would, if they were articulate, call for some one to alleviate their condition."

The sentimental overwriting, far from taking you viscerally into the pity and horror of the scene, has the opposite effect--blocking even an effective picture arising in the mind's eye (sure, I can do Ernest bloated too).

Goya understood multum in parvo far better than Hemingway ever did. Find a well-printed copy of 'Los Caprichios' and take your mind off this bloated nonsense.

Groucho Trilogy (a modest revue)

2008-11-14T17:38:00.000-08:00

Down below (ratatatatata)
Down Below(ratatatatata)
Sat the devil talking to his son
Who wanted to go
Up above(ratatatatata)
Up above(ratatatatata)
But the Devil said listen lad
Listen to your dear old dad

[Refrain:]
Stay down here where you belong
The folks who live above you don't know right from wrong

To please their kings they've all gone out to war
And not a one of them knows what he's fighting for

'Way up above they say that I'm a Devil and I'm bad
Kings up there are bigger devils than your dad

They're breaking the hearts of mothers
Making butchers out of brothers
You'll find more hell up there than there is down below

One can only speculate on the reasons Irving Berlin was embarrassed every time Groucho Marx--the only one who ever did--sang this song. It's as bold, imaginative, witty and daring as any lyric he ever wrote, but perhaps as his success waxed with the ongoing years he lost the desire to be, or to have it thought that he ever had been, daring. Groucho in a letter incorporated into the memoir Groucho and Me told Berlin that with all the great songs he'd written, he could afford to have it known that he'd let slip the odd turkey, but anyone who's heard his heartfelt rendering of it in An Evening With Groucho Marx, the Carnegie Hall concert, will know Groucho's real sentiments. He thought it was a great song that should be kept alive in people's memories. He was happy at every opportune moment to sacrifice the hundred dollars Berlin had promised to pay him each time he didn't sing the song. I think it'd be better for the world at large if this song and not White Christmas were his best known and most often recorded number.

This is one of many stories told in Groucho and Me (but I've gone to the Carnegie Hall concert for its rendition of this lyric. The quoted version in the book, and in the lryic sheet on Google, is less concise, so I suppose Groucho's rendition is a lyrical collaboration between the two. A good many of the same stories are retold in An Evening With, some of them more succinctly. It's in the book however that he developed the easygoing memoir style that (along with about a dozen great songs) drove the Carnegie Hall concert, and about a third of the book is just as good and didn't get into the concert. About a third of it would have been worth trimming, but two thirds of a fine book is two thirds more than you can find between most book covers.

In Groucho and Me he says the two films the Marx Brothers made with Irving Thalberg were their best, but in later years the first film that came to mind when interviewers posed the question was 'the war picture'--Duck Soup, which I think was far and away their best film but what do I know? I missed a golden opportunity to sell Enron stock at its highest posted value, just before the bottom fell out. What stopped me was that I didn't own any Enron stock, otherwise I'd have made a killing.)

The Groucho Letters is more uneven, but there are quite a few comic high points, some from other correspondents such as Fred Allen and Harry Kurnitz. A letter about attaching a remote control to his television to mute commercials seems prescient, even more so one to the President of Chrysler urging him to stop advertising speed so much and start advertising (and improving) auto safety and reducing carbon monoxide emissions. Ralph Nader didn't get around to tackling this subect for at least another decade, but then he'd have been in High School when this letter was written.

I've only begun Memoirs of a Mangy Lover, but so far it seems a slighter book than Groucho and Me.

I have a friend in Hollywood... I think I do, but I'm not sure. [laughter] His name is Harry Ruby [applause] and he wrote a lot of songs that I've sung over the years...
Today, Father, is Father's Day
And we're giving you a tie
It's not much we know
It is just our way of showing you
We think you're a regular guy
You say that it was nice of us to bother
But it really was a pleasure to fuss
For according to our mother
You're our father
And that's good enough for us
Yes, that's good enough for us

The Days Ahead

2008-11-05T16:29:00.001-08:00

From a Toronto Star report by Royson James (Nov 5) on election night in Selma, Alabama:

" 'I just feel overjoyed that God let me live to see this day--after the long struggle we had,' says Alice WEst, who alone registered 300 voters here at a time when that could get you killed.
'I just wish my husband (Lonzy) were here. He'd be so proud. He was in jail for the movement almost as many times as we slept together.' "

I'm quietly optimistic. I do hope the Messianic expectations being attached to Obama blow over quickly, because 1) a Messiah is a bad enough leader in an autocratic society--it's just about the worst leadership model possible in a democracy; 2) hopes keyed well above the possible might dangerously fester on contact with the inevitably plodding pace of change.

Some changes, particularly in domestic policy, might happen very quickly with a Democratic majority in the house and senate as well as the White House, but I don't know how long it'll take the most dedicated administration to wean the U.S. from its most dangerous foreign policy delusion. Obama may not even more than half agree with me on what that delusion is, but I expect he'll talk a great deal less than George Bush did about the War on Terror, and if he keeps his word will end the most disastrous phase of that war, the occupation of Iraq. He won't come right out and say, even if he believes, that the War on Terror has been a bountiful gift these past seven years to militarists, weaponeers and terrorists the wide world over, and far from containing the threat of terror has dramatically increased it. (Bin Laden if you'll remember endorsed John McCain. Or whoever that was presenting himself as Bin Laden--has there been serious voice analysis recently I wonder?) What he will do I hope is gradually help America's citizenry withdraw from their highly hyped Fear Fix.

Look at what's happened since 9-11--what has actually worked, not in some cases, not in most cases, but in all cases to prevent terrorist acts, contain terrorist cells and save actual lives? Dedicated police work backed by solid intelligence. The intelligence was available to head off 9-11 if infighting among the intelligence services hadn't prevented it being taken seriously. Has the war in Iraq prevented a single act of terror? No, it's provided a fertile breeding ground for terrorist action and training ground for tomorrow's terrorists. And reconstructors.

What we can rationally expect from the beginning is a President who realizes other nations exist, and doesn't use preemptive strikes the way he once used whiskey and cocaine--that's enough to be going on with for starters, and after that we'll see.

Congo Situation

2008-11-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

The photos were taken by my neice Ula on a recent working trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a happy and remarkable trip during which she worked with a number of local companies on dance and theatre workshops and studied the work of Congolese companies. It was a tremendously inspiring trip, she made many remarkable friends, and she's profoundly concerned about the crisis beginning to well up there again. The BBC stories she cites are a good place to start if you want to know more about the current situation, and the photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale is one of many sources for more background on the situation, as is an article in the Independent from May 2006. The photos say a great deal about the beauty of the land and its people.

Subject: Trouble in DRC Congo

Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 12:38:51 +0100

I am very worried about the situation in Eastern Congo -
The area where I visited this summer, which was enjoying
a relative moment of calm has since become flooded with refuges
descending from the North where rebels are fighting, threatening to
start a next civil war.

The friends I visited in Goma who run an art center say their
building and grounds are becoming a refuge for friends and
young people who live on the outskirts of town.

I hope recent diplomatic efforts will end the fighting
and the displacement of thousands of people.

You can read these links for more information:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7703606.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7699286.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3075537.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7696139.stm

My prayers are with those in Goma!

Ula

Chesterton's Dickens and Swift's Drapier's Letters

2008-10-03T17:26:00.000-07:00

Chesterton's Dickens and Swift's Drapier's Letters

It's sometimes interesting to consider books in tandem, even if the overlap between them is merely tangential. This is the only reference to Swift in Chesterton's remarkable study of Dickens (you'll have to wait for it a little, since what precedes it is crusial to Chesterton's argument and mine--nicely expressed too, which is always a bonus):

The optimist is a better reformer than the pessimist; and the man who believes life to be excellent is the man who alters it most. It seems a paradox, yet the reason of it is very plain. The pessimist can be enraged at evil. But only the optimist can be surprised at it. But only the optimist can be surprised at it. From the reformer is required a simplicity of surprise. He must have the faculty of a violent and virgin astonishment. It is not enough that he should think injustice distressing; he must
think injustice absurd, an anomaly in existence, a matter less for tears than for a shattering laughter. On the other hand, the pessimists at the end of the century could hardly curse even the blackest thing; for they could hardly see it against its black and eternal background. Nothing was bad, because everything was bad. Life in prison was infamous--like life anywhere else. The fires of persecution were vile--like the stars. We perpetually find this paradox of a contented discontent. Dr. Johnson takes too sad a view of humanity, but he is also too satisfied a Conservative. Rousseau takes too rosy a view of humanity, but he causes a revolution.
Swift is angry, but a Tory. Shelley is happy, and a rebel. Dickens, the optimist, satirizes the Fleet, and the Fleet is gone. Gissing, the pessimist, satirizes Suburbia, and Suburbia remains. (p. 13, Charles Dickens)

On Swift, Chesterton was, regrettably, a little tone deaf. There's an absurdity in the characterization of Swift here that Chesterton would have been the first to laugh at if it had been pointed out to him. Anger is a passing mood, even in people who are considerably disposed to it; people are never angry in the same sense as they have fingers and toes. Certainly if they lost their fingers and toes as they lose their tempers, they'd be hard pressed to make up the deficiency. But only on the most superficial reading is anyone likely to find Swift unusually disposed to anger. No single passage out of Swift gives anything like his full emotional range--this passage for instance (concluding the 'Letter to Lord Chancellor MIddleton' from The Drapier's Letters) has relatively little of his characteristic humour:

I sent these papers to an eminent lawyer (and yet a man of virtue and learning into the bargain) who, after many alterations returned them back, with assuring me, that they are perfectly innocent; without the least mixture of treason, rebellion, sedition, malice, disaffection, reflection, or wicked insinuation whatsoever.

If the bellman of each parish, as he goes his circuit, would cry out, every night, "Past twelve o'clock; Beware of Wood's halfpence;" it would probably cut off the occasion for publishing any more pamphlets; provided that in country towns it were done upon market days. For my own part, as soon as it shall be determined, that it is not against law, I will begin the experiment in the liberty of St. Patrick's; and hope my example may be followed in the whole city But if authority shall think
fit to forbid all writings, or discourses upon this subject, except such as are in favour of Mr. Wood, I will obey as it becomes me; only when I am in danger of bursting, I will go and whisper among the reeds, not any reflection upon the wisdom of my countrymen; but only these few words, BEWARE OF WOOD'S HALFPENCE.
(Letter to Lord Chancellor Middleton, Drapier's Letters.)

But this passage is not at all untypical of Swift's mood, especially when he wrote to persuade: direct, with a persistent lilt, the words lightly outlined by a shimmer of sadness. Of acourse there's rage prodding beneath the antic humour in much of his writing, but it's worth bearing in mind he had to watch the daily spectacle of the nation where he passed most of his life being brutalized and starved deliberately, with calculation, the upper crust of that nation (who mostly resided abroad) collaborating in that oppressive effort. Sure it would try your patience.

As for Swift being Tory, he switched allegiance from the Whigs early in his life for two principal reasons: he was a devout minister and at least the avant garde of the Whigs were openly atheistic; and the Whigs were a party devoted to war. He was uneasy identifying with any party, and certainly enraged Tories as much as he did Whigs, and for the same reason: neither party at its core was either thoughtful or humane, and he was more than happy to rag at them both continuously over that. He certainly always aimed at changing the status quo ante, and if the wider reforms he sought persistently remained illusive, some of the finest passagaes in Chesterton's Charles Dickens show precisely how partial Dickens' success as a reformer was as wellj, meaning how much is left to us still to do. While Swift is certainly not alone in the concerns he championed, and would never for a moment have claimed he was, it's notable how many of the reforms that have been shakily established over the centuries, and how many we still hope (many of us) to establish, read as if they were cribbed from Swift's Irish and English Tracts. And Swift did lead one successful small revolution at least, whose record has come down to us in The Drapier's Letters (quoted above): the campaign against the imposition from England upon Ireland of William Wood's halfpence and farthings. Either Swift was an exception to Chesterton's astute prescription for (partially) successful reformers, or Swift was far from permanently encased in a carapace of rage, and whatever his temporal dissatisfactions, had made his own peace with life as it's normally lived.

I think it would be more true to say that Chesterton's an exception, the sole one I know of in fact, to the general rule that Swift's most savage critics tend to see, and faithfully describe in their monstrous characterizations of him, not Swift but what he showes them in the sort of glass he typically employs. Not really an exception either, since Chesterton's far from savage in his criticism of Swift, only profoundly mistaken, and he never attempted a full length study or even an article on Swift, and may have read, and innocently absorbed, more of others' corrupt judgments of Swift than of Swift himself.

But if the impulse to reform is always born of embattled love for the world just as it is, humanity even as we find it, what then? Does Swift's impassioned medley of hilarity, invective, irony rough and smooth, eloquence sharp and gentle, the steadfast gaze of his fierce mild eyes amount to an ignorant denunciation we can safeably shrug aside or an urgent warning we ignore at our peril? Are humanity's many defenders really protecting us from Swift's unwarranted abuse, or encouraging us to prefer any shipwreck no matter how absolute, rather than the slightest rebuke to our self-esteem?

Servicing the Leaks

2008-09-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

All right, seriously: is there any doubt anymore that wealthy conservatives a) take it as a first principle tht people ought to be accountable for the consequences of their actions b) make it the first principle they abandon the moment it's applied to their actions?

What are the usual consequences of financial management that ranges between criminal negligence and outright fraud? Particularly in commodities that, because of slack government oversight, have been able to instintutionalise c.n. and f. as normal practice? Restitution as far as that's possible I would have thought, and a considerable term segregated from the population at large in orange jumpsuits. Apparently not: what conduct like that merits is a heavy government subsidy to encourage further reckless and criminal speculation. Swift, who most of his life identified as Tory, would have found this logic quite impersuasive.

A bailout of people who put their money into these c.n. and f. institutions in good faith--that might make sense. They could be counted on to make responsible use of the money. Ideally they'd be sharp-eyed and invest more wisely next time, though in the present climate of institutional corruption they'd have to peer about them very carefully indeed. A great many 'sound', 'rock solid' investments these days are minefields of opportunity. Boom! there goes an arm and a leg or worse.

A bailout of people who acted cynically, in bad faith and if anybody could be bothered to investigate, criminally even according to laws that favour sharp practices among the rich that the poor go to jail for? Besides being morally repugnant, it's sure to produce disastrous consequences. Far from saving the world's economy, it will encourage the usual suspects in preparing the world for its next--will it be 2 trillion this time?--fiscal sucker punch.

C 2008 Martin Heavisides

Post Olympic Toss

2008-08-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

Post Olympic Toss

So I'm reading about preparations for potential protestors in Denver and this sentence sort of leaps off the page at me (Thomas MacCharles, Aug 25 '08):

"The city of Denver also has spent $2.1 million on protective gear for police and passed bylawns to ban the hurling of feces or urine."

You mean to tell me neither the city of Denver nor the state of Colorado has any law on the books that would make it at least a high misdemeanour to fling feces or urine at a prominent citizen or a candidate standing for election to the throne of high office? And nobody's noticed this loophole and acted on it in the past?

"Nyaah! nyaah!
Can't jail me.
I only tossed a
Bucket o'pee.
Nyaah! nyaah!
You can't do squat.
That was shit I
Threw not snot."

If nobody's taken advantage of a law as seriously disabled as that, it shows a seriously disappointing lack of enterprise and initiative among Colorado's miscreant population. Let me tell you, we had a loophole like that in Toronto, we'd be all over it like flies on. . . well. Never mind. They've plugged the hole now, unless . . . I wonder. Does the new bylaw say anything that specifically excludes airplane flyover delivery? There must be a rock band in the vicinity with a Lear Jet currently not in use as they're between tours. Get your asses in gear, boys and girls of the great midwest--you may be in business yet. You just have to think ahead.

C 2008 Martin Heavisides

Not Twice This Play

2008-08-13T17:54:00.000-07:00

{This is the introduction I wrote to accompany my play, Empty Bowl, now published online at Linnet's Wings [www.thelinnetswings.net] Take a look any of you that care to, and if you like what you see and care to spread the word, I'd be very much appreciative. }

Not Twice This Play

Empty Bowl is rewritten, rethought and considerably expanded from a one act play I wrote in 1973, inch foot time gem, which for a one act play intended to run an hour had far too many irreducible flaws. Whole scenes intended to capture the enigmatic character of the Zen koan came out obscurantist and befuddling rather; those I excised. In Act III of Empty Bowl I re-used about two pages of Eshun's long speech from the earlier play, though most of Eshun's dialogue's original to this version. None of the other characters already featured--Nobunaga, Nobushige, Hakuin, Peasant in Blue Kimono (renamed Ainu in Empty Bowl)--spoke in their real voices yet, so their dialogue here is totally fresh. (I tell a lie. I did retain two lines from the earlier, much shorter version of the fairground shell game scene:

NOBUNAGA

It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

AINU

I dunno. Six of one, half dozen of the other if you ask me.

Well, would you have cut that?)

The prologue, 'inch foot', and the epilogue, 'not twice this day', considerably reworked, still frame the action of Empty Bowl. Quite a few images I thought effective have been retained, such as Ainu, back from numerous campaigns, a one-eyed double amputee. Narrative threads originally independent of each other have been integrated into one continuous story line.

Wabi, Tamago, Minaki, Taka and various secondary characters are entirely new to this version. inch foot time gem was missing them.

It often takes a long time for the true form of a play to be disclosed, even to its author.

Speech

2008-03-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

Speech

Nobody before me or since has ever been such a stalwart and steadfast defender and believer in change. If we fear change, how can we change fear to hope? If we have no hope we're hopeless and what can change that? Only change.

Change, not fear, is the law of life. Fear is a valid reaction when you need to run away from something dangerous, but what's the safest getaway rout? Change.

To flee from change out of fear is to stay in the same place while running, and how is that even logical?

Chose to be changed in the immortal words of the poet Reiner Mary Wilker. Even better: choose to change!

Bear in mind when contributing that change is good. Folding money is better.

excerpt from Firewatcher's Wages

2008-03-08T13:02:00.001-08:00

FIREWATCHER'S WAGES

"We'd heard your fame as a seer
but no one looks for seers in Argos"
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Robert Fagles tr.

"I wa-wa-wa-want you like the rich want wa-war
So ho---old me darling like prisons hold the poor."
Sheilah Gostick

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
Thomas Wyatt

Act I

Flames Leap Mountains From Troy to Argos

Scene i Heraclitus Firewatcher Brilliant Noses

[the first light onstage is a tiny glow like a candle flame, but fixed, above a wigwam shape with sticks protruding, on the backstage wall left further points of light over stylized bonfire images will appear at intervals throughout, until they form a complete row stage lights begin to come up slowly]

HERACLITUS FIREWATCHER

Awake! stay awake, a year awake! you tell me that's not excessive
A dog's life? not by a long shot, dogs sleep all the time
Wake at the slightest unexpected sound or flicker of light
Wake up and yap like a Barbarian on cue

[stage lights fully up on an otherwise bare stage heraclitus firewatcher, with a few possessions gathered about him, stands by a wigwam- shaped bonfire just waiting to be lit another light flickers up on the wall behind]

Brilliant nose a dog has! might even sniff the blaze
Starting up on a miles-distant hill but that's never been tested
My damn luck, I'm not a dog, I have hands not paws
Opposable thumbs, you need that to hold a torch
Set a fire going to match the fire in the distance
Not to mention how few dogs speak excellent Greek
See what I mean? as you hear me speaking it now
The better to bring the news to our faithful Queen ho ho
What she has in mind for Agamemnon I've heard the rumours
I wouldn't wish on a dog but shh! (fingers to lips)
I might on a King

Scene ii Heraclitus Philosopher beneath skin, above bone

[a man enters wings left, in tattered once-white toga not unfamiliar with holes, and begins to speak out aggressively at the apron
of the stage]

HERACLITUS PHILOSOPHER

intelligence damped and sickened by green paper colour of mould midas it seems is your epitome of earthly success because his touch was instant death to the daughter he loved above all human creatures? i'll grant you, she made an impressive statue had he been a sculptor, known a few friends who resembled the gods, his curse might have served some function statues of gold, colour of mead-darkened piss, more godlike than the gods because he starved, every bit of food he tried to eat turning to useless gold? donkeys are brighter than that, they know garbage at least is edible, gold is just too tough a chew

haven't heard medusa celebrated the same way women had it rough in my time as well

do you imagine croesus diverted the river to right and left so the stream in the middle would no longer be impossible for his soldiers to ford? his money, his implements, many slaves of his purchase and some few skilled workmen in his hire, carried out the work of hands but the work of mind, without which the rest, bold solid streams of mead-darkened piss, would have had no effect, was thales' money is not mind, it has no power apart from the skill deployed in its use (and we thought we were overloaded with gods of our own election, no earthly function in 'em) no value at all if hoarded and stockaded, then it chokes and kills

name a shoe for running after a goddess of swift intelligence, confusing the fiery rapidity of thought more than humanly supple with the gangly fleetness of sweat-reeking ankle, instep and heel (what a lovely libation to offer the goddess that caps their toes!)

claim to know the river you step in is not the river you stand in (any phrase can be turned to gabble it seems) but don't know you who step there are a river coursing vertically beneath skin, above bone, ceaselessly changing, well? (some that only half learned this found a sudden panic as they stepped into the river dissolved their skin carried them rushing away on the current, one with the current, one with the undertow and gone to the grief and astonishment of loved ones and strangers watching from shore

[darts off wings left, pops his head back]

if their bones were ever found i never heard of it)

[exits completely]

Scene iii Heraclitus Firewatcher A Fixed Reliable Commodity

HERACLITUS FIREWATCHER

Don't mind him, we get philosophers all the time coming by to harangue the populace, it's a fulltime occupation among us Greeks Not always that well-paying as you can see, though there are those do all right by teaching Diction, vocabulary, sneaky ways to fool people in an argument mostly This one has the same name as me, Heraclitus and I quite like him Not very social, I'll grant you that, says his piece and then off, not nearly as personable as Diogenes but between the aggression in his voice and the challenge trying to riddle out what his speeches mean, he's useful for keeping a body awake Some of the others could put you to sleep so fast and do I need that? Like I need to forfeit my life on the gibbet or the chopping block (Shivers) Our local chief axeman? gives me the creeping willies I'm sorry but if you've just severed permanently the relationship between a man's head and body, you don't say to the mob of drrols and leers panting looking on "It's been a slice" Hemlock you say? That's for a higher class of gent

A knife in a dark corner, extrajudicial? that'll happen
Bold to speak out as these fellows do when you think
How permanent a silence the wrong word can buy you
I do find the more I hear this one speak
The more sense I discover in his words
Some I can't make hide nor hair I'm told these philosophers in their trance states
Sometimes look deep into the future, you'd lose your present day audience there
As if the past and present aren't more than enough mess to deal with!
I tried once you know, stepping in a river?
Sure seemed like the same river when I was standing in it
Even when I stepped out, rivers are a fixed reliable commodity
Compared to human life as it flows out its course
My son among the fallen at Troy? we had messages at irregular intervals
Until three years ago or a little more, since when dead silence
Not a word from him, no other messengers will tell us anything
Sparing our feelings I expect, prize method of accomplishing that!
Confirm our worst fears almost and yet leave hanging
Above our heads on a thin string like Damocles' sword
The fraying hope that if he's far less a hero than Achilles
His prospects of survival at least are better
Not so it seems though perhaps. . . I can't sleep thinking about it
That was a joke, though a bitter one I admit

Movie Lines, a new quiz

2008-02-23T15:48:00.000-08:00

Just lines from movies this time around. Mostly single lines, but a couple of exchanges. Also two song couplets. As before, I don't have a library of scripts encompassing all these, so the wording may not always be verbatim.

1. "By the authority vested in me as Captain of this ship, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution."
2. "To me that gassy smell is. . . victory. One day this war is going to end."
3. "The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river."
4 "I feel like my life's going on without me in it."
5. "What's left after love dies? Only admiration and respect."
6. "All right. I'll be your dumb decoy duck."
7. (sung) "We are all the singing waiters.
We will sing or serve potatoes."
8. "He was a bad cop."
"But he was a good thief."
9. "And what magazines sell best?"
"The ones with ladies on the front covers and no front covers on the ladies."
10. "A man in Michigan was sentenced to 12 years in jail for having two joints."
11. "I bet on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here."
12. "Sheriff Deeds is dead, honey. You just sheriff Jr."
"Story of my life."
13. "Shoot straight, you bastards. Don't make a mess of it."
14. "Ah, before, madam. Before I was a mass of light. Mad, you see. Nothing was fast enough to match my inner speed. Now I'm sane. The world sweats into my brain, madam."
"Don't keep calling me madam."
15. "We're not laughing at you, Dawn. We're laughing with you."
"But I'm not laughing."
16. "Do you think he knows how much trouble he's in?"
"He must. He saw the sme things I did and they certainly made an impression on me."
17. (sung) "Come now, gentlemen, your love is all I crave.
You'll still be in this circus when I'm laughing, laughing in my grave."
18. "The English lion will be drinking his tea out of German saucers, eh?"
19. "Why did you start the rumour that I am. . . with one foot in the grave?"
"What you said to me the first time we met--"I've heard of you. You said that in a very nasty way."
"That's all?"
"That's all?! Hell, isn't that enough?"
20. "What are they saying?"
" 'Meat, meat, fresh meat, coming up the river.' "

Fxing Up a Place

2008-01-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

"Bandaids no Solution to Low Income Housing" is the headline on a small story from the inside pages of a newspaper I remember from some time ago. I've never been able to guess, then or since, who ever imagined they would be a solution. In the first place you'd require an impractical number of them to make even the most rudimentary dwelling, in the second place unless they were stiffened in some way, they'd be far too flimsy--a moderate breezze would tear holes in the fabric of the walls. And why go to all the trouble of stiffening and reinforcing band aids, and making them a much larger size so they'd be usable for building, when sturdier materials are readily available? (How would you ever install electricity? and plumbing? one ill timed flush and a three bedroom unit could come down like an overpadded, majorly sticky house of cards.)

I can understand if it was a government sponsored feasibility study. The more impractical an idea, the better suited to study by dedicated committee, and the number of tests you'd need to run, simply to show willing, would be minimal. After that, gravy--collating the opinions, majority and dissenting, of experts analysing test data minutely. One or two grant extensions to handle cost overruns, and all concerned can bank a tidy sum. Apply that to your mortgage et voila! housing solution.

Amazing there was no study commissioned of bandaids for housing by FEMA, in the wake of its advance scouts Katrina and Rita. (Then again considering the number of black holes down which money swirled in course of that rescue effort cum Fortune 500 feeding trough, perhaps they did. And there's this to be said for a house made of bandaids--a mid-sized wolf could blow it right down, but it wouldn't stand day after day delivering toxic fumes to the lungs, skin tissue and other vital organs, as FEMA's trailers do to the people living in 'em--if nobody's taken to calling them gas chamber specials, it's past time somebody did.)

I ought to get in on this myself, if someone can point me the right direction to apply for funding. I'm thinking maybe. . . for condo highrises. . . surgical gauze? Practical? who knows? but picture it: you have to admit there's a certain poetry. . .

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Two Thousand Eight

2008-01-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

A New Year's letter to the Globe and Mail reads:

Why, oh why, do people say two thousand and eight?" Shouldn't it be called twenty-oh-eight," in the same way that we said "nineteen ninety eight", "eighteen ninety nine" etc. etc.?

I've never heard anyone say "nineteen hundred and forty two". Have you? Please explain.
Zelda Ruth Harris, Toronto

I think people say two thousand eight--generally discarding the 'and' as superfluous--for the same reason they say nineteen ninety eight--verbal fluency. Nineteen hundred ninety eight is cumbersome and takes too long to spit out. Twenty oh-eight takes no longer to say than two thousand eight, but I've never encountered an epiglottis that was comfortable with a three word phrase it's impossible to speak without a break between the first and second word. People will soon enough be saying twenty ten, but only those with a pedantic bent and a tin ear will ever say twenty oh-nine.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Some Assembly Required

2008-01-04T16:14:00.000-08:00

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C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Shedding the Dead Skin of Language

2008-01-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

Robert Fulford had a column [Nat Post Dec 31 '07] concerning the tendency for buzzwords to crowd into spoken and written language, pushing thought clear out of the picture. The main targets he had in his sights were 'carbon footprint' and 'paradigm shift', and I thought he was right about both. I liked the phrase 'paradigm shift' when I first heard it, because if you excavate far enough back to its earliest uses, it has a clear meaning that can't be expressed with equal succinctness otherwise. But when people start talking about the paradigm shift in their thinking that has led to buying coffee at Starbucks instead of Tim Horton's, or vice versa, it's time to call a halt. And if you've got a phrase like 'carbon footprint' that can be easily and righteously slotted into sentences because it's become ubiquitous, you tend to write sentences that much more mechanically. My only complaint with this part of his thesis is that he doesn't go far enough. I don't mean he doesn't comprehensively list the deadassed words and boxcar phrases that choke and clot commentary pieces of all descriptions--how could you list more than a small fraction of them in a column of only eight hundred words? But if we're going after ubiquitous expressions that convey a glow of unearned righteousness to a sentence while at the same time stifling the possibility that it might contain solid meaning, I can think of at least two, far more prevalent than 'carbon footprint' and 'paradigm shift' , that are equally worthy of ruthless excision. I'll come back to that in a moment.

Fulford concludes this piece by complaining about big words, which strikes me as off the point he's been making--neither 'carbon', 'footprint' nor 'shift' is a conspicuously big word, and 'paradigm' is only three syllables unless you pronounce it wrong. I also don't see where the use of small words invariably leads to clarity. There are no big words in the phrase 'do your own thing', but if it has ever been used to express a lucid notion, I can't recollect when that was.

Neither are big words invariably more obscure than the itsy bitsy ones. I'm pretty sure you could convey what's meant by translucent in words of one or two syllables--but such a lot of them! And odds are in the thicket of words you'd need to convey it, the meaning would not be clarified but considerably obscured. What chiefly makes for clear writing is thought, and it's easily possible to think very little and yet use very tiny words.

So what recurrent buzzwords would I retire, along with 'carbon footprint' and 'paradigm shift', at least until people are prepared to use them thoughtfully and honestly? 'Terrorist' and 'coward' (and all their variant forms). At the very least I'd insist people not lead with these, drop the 't' word, the 'c' word or the ever popular 'c-t' combination in the first sentence of a think piece to colour all that follows. Give us a little evidence first, to back up the clamouring insistence of your jerking knee. But if the evidence is there, what exactly do you gain by affixing the gummy label? Do you seriously think the average thoughtful person anywhere in the world is going to read an accurate account of a suicide bombing that claims from 12 to 72 lives and think this is a noble act if not rigorously prompted from the wings: "Hey! heads up there--cowardly terrorists." Do you seriously think anybody who does think it's a noble act is going to be suddenly stricken with conscience when attacked by the label? You know perfectly well it's far likelier they'll feel glamorized by the distinction (and snicker gleefully at the grotesque misuse of the word 'cowardly').

'Cowardly terrorist'--the only one-two rhetorical punch I can recall that matches this one was the phrase used by Communist and Trostkyist radicals in my university days over anything at all that got up their noses--'fascist, racist'. They were a little more single-minded--they never used one word without the other for reinforcement. I once helpfully suggested that they merge the two into one word, 'fracist'. The suggestion was not well received. Shall we update it? 'Cowartryst'? It's a thought.

Anyone who thinks 'cowartryst' is a less dangerous compound than 'carfonbootprint' ought, in conscience, to ask Maher Arar's opinion, or that of the likely hundred similar innocents still in the rendition cycle in Syria or points east. I suppose we can congratulate ourselves that we rescued him at last, after unconscionable delay--but if we hadn't shipped him off as a cowartryst on essentially no evidence, and ignored the evidence in his favour until it was possible to ignore it no longer, we would have saved ourselves the trouble of redeeming a great injustice by not committing it in the first place. It's amazing how wise a plan that seems in retrospect. The only reason it didn't at the time was that 'coward' and 'terrorist' lay over all our thought like a security blanket we could collectively shiver under. If we don't cower like rats in holes, fearful of shadows and the smoke in our minds of imaginary poisons, the nasty, ugly, cowardly terrorists will have won. Could we all just grow up a little please?

There's one very good reason to avoid buzzwords like 'cowartryst' and 'carfonbootprint' as far as humanly possible--they grossly impede our ability to think. There's a reason they recur with the frequency of addictions--they relieve us of the obligation to think. No committed democrat can have any excuse for succumbing to that addiction, because none of the world's tyrannies, the external forces we are constantly being urged to cower back from in terror, has anything like the force required to unseat any of the world's democracies. Tyrannical forces within democracy are powerful enough to unseat it, but only if we thoughtlessly succumb to their agendas. So let's try and do without the buzzwords that urge us to surrender our freedoms in exchange for the chatter of fear and trembling in the night--shall we?

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

What Do You Mean?

2008-01-03T17:24:00.000-08:00

In a recent review of the film adapted from it, the Toronto film critic Rick Groen referred to The Kite Runner as "the kind of book that is read even by people who don't read books." This is the most recent citation I'm aware of, but as anyone who reads reviews will tell you, there are many books like this. So here's what I'm wondering: how many books can a nonbook reader read before ceasing to be a person who doesn't read books?

Form over content. A writer I quite like has a habit of marring three to five passages in each of his books because of his fetish for this phrase. Every time it comes up it sucks meaning out of the sentence and sometimes the whole paragraph it pops up in, because it's a phrase empty of any coherent meaning. Form can be deceptive if insufficiently studied, from too narrow a range of perspectives, but the idea that form and content are separable is a trick of oversphistication played by the mind on its very own self. Thoughts and feelings, as much as any physical entity, have detectable existence insofar, and only insofar, as you can discern in them a shape. Form isn't a transparency laid over content which can be stripped away to reveal content more fully, as a snake sheds its skin to reveal--well, another skin underneath, so it seems even a snake can't exist independent of the form its skinsack supplies. But if we're looking for analogies, form is at least as much the breath of content as its skin, and content is discoverable without form to the same degree life is discoverable without breath.

A film critic in our local alternative weekly writes of a colleague who recently died: "he wrote with absolute honesty." Maybe this is partly excused by deadline pressures, but how `can someone write nonsense like that and expect to be believed? Any of us might aim to write with absolute honesty, but if we're honest with ourselves we know that the best aim in the world isn't always true. Mailer may have been exaggerating in the opposite direction when he said "all writers are dishonest except when, bless us, we're honest for a minute or two--which are the moments that inspire us to go on writing," but it shows a far more nuanced understanding of what a difficult negotiation honesty actually is. Anybody who has the nerve to accuse me of absolute honesty after I'm gone had better hope I have no way of getting back from the beyond; it's not an insult I'd take lying down.

A blurb taken from a review by Henry Louis Gates Jr. refers to The Great Debate as "an intelligent masterpiece that must be seen". It might be worth hunting up the piece that quote comes from, since it sets up a distinction that hadn't occurred to me, and I'm curious whether he names any of the "unintelligent masterpieces" he's implicitly comparing this to, or just leaves us to presume there are a great many out there, and make our own lists.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Here in the Islands

2007-12-27T07:47:00.000-08:00

Cutline on a poster for a health information seminar:
"1 in 8 Men are Expected to Develop Prostrate Cancer."

How exactly is this expectation conveyed I wonder? Any thoughts? Mass mailing perhaps? And how exactly do they pick the 1 in 8 they expect will shoulder this burden? Is it completely random or are there certain categories of exemption? Inquiring minds want to know.

Canvassers asking if you want to donate to a disease are already endemic.
"Would you care to make a donation to cancer?"
"I don't guess so, it's already had my testicles, I think that's more than enough to give in one lifetime."
"I'd just as soon keep the other breast if you don't mind. I might feel differently if I could afford reconstructive surgery."
"Care to give something to Alzheimer's?"
"I'm just about certain I already--isn't it lovely here in the islands, Jen?"

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Ahh, Go Ahead. . . Follow Your Heart

2007-12-22T18:17:00.001-08:00

"Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time."
--Jonathon Swift

There are cliches that have only the shallow meaning they typically display, but these are actually quite rare. Far more frequently a cliche is a phrase or expression capable of deep meaning in proper context, but in the present instant being used as a cover for shallow thought. It's easy enough to prove a saying false if you ignore its depth and focus on the shallowest of its available meanings, but what does that net you? A cliche rebuttal of a cliche.

It's possible I suppose to understand "Live each day as if it were your last" in the stunted and empty sense Jonathon Kay (Nat Post, Dec 11 '07) is at pains to refute, but who that took the idea seriously ever did mean what he accuses us of meaning by it? What's almost invariably behind a life lived in hellbound excess, without plan or goal, is an increasingly desperate attempt to cling to the delusion that one is untouchable--indestructible--will live forever. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, weeks before his untimely death, was saying to people "Stick close to me if there's an atomic war. You'll be in a safe zone, no bomb's going to kill me." He was right--no bomb did.

There's no necessary contradiction, on the other hand, between living each day as if it were your last and making plans--even long distance plans--in case it turns out not to be. There might be if you were obliged to live by one maxim and one maxim only, but how stupid is that? I recently finished, in a thirty day spurt of activity, a play whose first partial and abandoned draft I started twenty years ago. My awareness waxed and waned, but I always carried somewhere in my mind the intelligence that one day would be my last, and that I had no guarantee it would be twenty years, or twenty months, or twenty days away. So fine, make plans, recognizing they're all contingent, but recognize as well that each day is a gift that will not be repeated in the same form ever again, and may not be repeated at all. Don't grow so engrossed by plans for the future that you ignore this precious jewel of time and space, yours to shape (within limits) as you choose. (Definitely lay off any plans that'll take more than a century to realize.)

Kay is more cautious in attacking the maxim "Follow your heart"--he makes it clear he's talking about a common understanding whereby following any superficial impulse is described as "following your heart". Why accept the misuse of language then? Why not say what people really mean is "follow your nose" or "follow the prickling of the hairs on your forearm", or whatever superficial guide you prefer, rather than one so firmly embedded at the core of existence as the heart?

If I understand him correctly, Kay believes it's reasonable in youth to pursue the dream the heart prompts you to, and acceptable to continue if you succeed; if not, wise at some point to come up with a plan B. Not the worst advice in the world, but how likely is it that anyone with a deep passion will follow it? If Louis Armstrong had spent twnety years in the wilderness instead of achieving considerable success early in his career, do you think he'd have looked for a plan B? William Blake with his incredibly wide-ranging gifts could have succeeded in any number of careers other than the one he stubbornly clung to all his life, at which he only succeeded posthumously.

He was as politically astute as any British Prime Minister. He had as much unforced eloquence as any three combined. Only one of them might be considered--not by me--his equal as a writer. None was close to his equal as a painter, but then that's not exactly a Prime Ministerial qualification. Very likely that gift would disappear into doodling impulses during idle moments at session, and his great power as a writer be chained to partisan political discourse. Blake as Prime Minister. What countries would he have forced war on, in what far-flung corners of the globe, to vent the bitterness of his frustration over unacted desires?

Are there follies and even crimes associated with following the heart? I suppose. But the ugliest crimes human beings are capable of, the ones it freezes the blood even to have described? All of them, without a single exception, follow from stifling impulses of the heart.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Mulroney v. Schrieber

2007-12-15T16:45:00.000-08:00

"Mulroney will triumph in the court of public opinion because he's up against Karlheinz Schrieber. If he were up against no one, he would lose."
--John Ivison, Nat Post, Dec 14 '07

I'm not so sure. A Breakfast Television poll may give early indication, and it was running better than 75% against Mulroney. I doubt Karlheinz Schrieber would have come out better in a poll answered by the same people, but see here's the thing: people do not necessarily and invariably choose sides in an adversarial contest. Sometimes they say 'a plague on both your houses'. They're particularly likely to despise, more or less equally, two adversaries who've had a bitter falling out, but were questionably allied for an uncomfortable length of time. As Ivison points out at the top of this article, Mulroney began by calling Schrieber's allegations 100% false and ended by citing the man as a character witness: "[Schrieber] told the Toronto Sun that accusations of bribery against Brian Mulroney were as much a hoax as the Hitler Diaries." Not a word-for-word quote I suspect, since it lacks that curious Karlheinz broken English flare: but it's syntactically and referentially challenged enough; 'twil serve.

(Incidentally years ago I saw an interview on television with one of the people who exposed those diaries as a fake, and he said they were written in ballpoint pen. With camouflage that cunning it's hardly a surprise they fooled so many of the world's major news bureaux for so long.)

Then again in his opening remarks Mulroney only said Schrieber's allegations in the affidavit that led to the inquiry were "completely false". Perhaps Schrieber has superstitions against lying to reputable newsmen? no wait, this was the Toronto Sun, he'd have to have reservations against lying to journalists of any kind. But I imagine the three envelopes of cash were cited in the affidavit, and Mulroney contests only the amount--75,000, not one hundred thousand. That allegation, then, is at least 75% true.

And there's a difficulty with Mulroney's claim. The amount he declared for tax purposes, six years later than he ought to have filed, was three hundred thousand. This was the amount admitted to by Mulroney and his press liaison, and I've never heard them contest it since. If he was given 75,000 a pop along with the coffee which was all he admitted to at the time of the airbus lawsuit, he met Schrieber four times. In which case it's a coin toss whose account is nearer the truth.

(Or was this the amount the Mulroney team admitted to at the beginning of all this pother? Commentators are already taking Mulroney's revision as read, which means either my memory is cloudy or theirs is convenient. I was pretty sure that's what I'd read though, and that I'd read it in statements from the Mulroney team as well as Schrieber. Did Mulroney take the totals Schrieber initially gave on faith, until he'd counted the amounts still left in the safety deposit boxes and checked them against expenditures?)

This is a problem likely to persist throughout Mulroney's testimony. Given the number of half truths, quarter truths and evasions both have insisted on as the whole truth and nothing but, is he or Karlheinz Schrieber more to be believed? At best you could give a shade or a shaving to one or the other on this point or that. And you'd be speculating at that. Give Mulroney maximum benefit of the doubt at every point and what do you come up with? Maybe not as dishonest as Karlheinz Schrieber. There's an accolade. Add in that your first known association with Karlheinz Schrieber was in 1983, when he spearheaded a team backing your successful bid for the Conservative Party leadership, which led to a ten year term in the PMO, during all which time you insist there was never any payback to a man who doesn't do favours withot expecting payback--well, I'd say the old legacy's pretty much built.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

This is Not an Art Critique

2007-12-07T17:49:00.000-08:00

From the defense his roommate and fellow artist Peter Moheddin makes in a commentary (Nat Post, Dec 6, 2007), I hope Thorassin Jonsson has the sense not to call him as a witness, should his public mischief charge come to a trial. If I were a judge subjected to such nonsense in defense of somebody planting a fake bomb as an artistic statement, I'd find my thoughts shifting from a stiff fine or community service to moderately serious jail time.

Apparently Jonsson agrees with Moheddin's essential argument (whether point by point I don't know) since he's taken to expressing great pride in the success of his project--planting a realistic-looking bomb, labelled (after Magritte?) 'This is Not a Bomb' at the Royal Ontario Museum on Nov 28 and phoning in a 'no bomb' warning to the ROM switchboard. This replaces an initially apologetic tone. I think he's got the whiff of publicity up his nostrils.

Peter Moheddin begins his defense with a reference to the curious fact that audiences at 'The Great Train Robbery' were so startled by a shot of a train coming toward the camera full speed that they fled the theatre--an effect similar to that achieved by Thorassin Jonsson's 'not-bomb'.

It seems a curious example. Apart from the fact that this was not intended, who has ever talked about'The Great Train Robbery' as a serious work of art? Not even its makers. It occupies a place in the history of cinema as the first film to tell a sustained story, but if I were listing the great short films of movie history, I'd certainly name Mack Sennett's 'Teddy at the Throttle', Laurel and Hardy's 'Big Business', W.C. Fields' 'A Fatal Glass of Beer' among many others. I would certainly not name 'The Great Train Robbery'.

Coming down to present cases. After a long rambling paragraph about the controversy over the not-bomb, Moheddin concludes: ". . . the defining function of a bomb is that it can explode." And?

The implication here--and it's pretty well what you have to argue if you want to claim Jonsson's false alarm was a work of art rather than a high misdemeanour--is that the reaction of the bomb squad was stupid. Duh! guys, this is not a bomb, it can't explode, it even says so right on it. What are you so worried about? To which the obvious answer is duh! how do we know something that looks exactly like a functioning bomb isn't until we test it? It would have been stupid, if not criminally insane, to look at it, see the sign and say "Hey guys, look at this! Says here it's not a bomb. That's a relief! now we can all go home."

What was stupid, profoundly cynical or both (my money's on both) was Jonsson's imperviousnes to the actual consequences of what he was doing, the impact on people's lives as well as the possible juridical implications. The law student who assured Jonsson if he attached a note saying 'This is not a bomb', he'd be absolved of liability? I suspect--what's more I hope--he's getting nothing but Fs on all his courses. It's certainly the grade Jonsson deserves for this project.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

What's Sushi Like?

2007-12-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

All quotes below are from James Geary's 'The Art of the Aphorism' (Nat Post, Nov 29, '07). He may not have contributed the title, which seems to be error-free.

"There is an aphorism for everything, and everything its aphorism: That's my philosophy."
? Can a single sentence be a philosophy? Not if its redundancy serves only to make its intended statement incoherent.

". . . only a fool makes a speech in a burning house. Aphorisms must work quickly because they are meant for use in emergencies. We're most in need of aphorisms at times of distress or joy, ecstasy or anguish."
Ok, I'll bite. In what way do joy and ecstasy figure in moments of personal emergency? Sorting from this sentence the terms that do apply, I don't see how despair or anguish is likely to heighten anyone's appreciation of even so embattled an aphorism as Swift's "Is this an Age of Man to consider a crime improbable merely because it is great?" Anguish might make you more sensitive to emotion, though it's likelier to deliver you over to indiscriminate puddles of it; in neither case does it necessarily heighten sensitivity to sharp, precise thought; and despair tends to flatten response to thought and feeling both.

A little later he quotes, as an example of "the surreal one liners of standup comic Steven Wright:
'When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.' "
Not the sharpest one liner I've ever heard, and surreal? Put it in a box of four with 2.) a fur covered coffee cup, 3.) a landscape of melted watches, 4.) a man looking in a mirror at the image of the back of his head, and sing "One of these things is not like the others."
Geary himself manages an (unintentionally?) surreal effect though, in his final paragraph:
"Aphorisms are food for thought--always fresh, always in season, always delicious. Like sushi, they come in small portions that are exquisitely formed. And, like sushi, I can never get enough."
Sushi can never get enough of aphorisms? This I never heard.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Mixed Messages

2007-11-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

"At some point in all our lives, someone you love or know will be affected by diabetes."

.'all our lives, someone you know or love': pronoun agreement would seem to require 'we'.

.'someone you love or know': are the two, as this seems to imply, really mutually exclusive? The philosophical implications are staggering.

The poster for which this phrase is a cutline advertises a fundraising--wait for it--bake sale. Cakes, pies, cookies, doughnuts, cupcakes, brownies, the whole nine yards. Nice compacting of effects: help create the condition at the same time as you're raising funds for its cure. Me? I want to start a new career handling the bar concessions for Islamic fundraisers.

Pearlies

2007-11-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

PEARLIES

You learn something new every day. There's a new product called
'White Light': you pull back your lips and press this gizmo against
your teeth, and besides emitting an eerie white glow it gives you a
dazzling smile until it wears off and you need another pressing. How
many of these before you get gold?

What happens if you smile too broadly and expose the yellow at
opposing sides of the mouth where the light doesn't reach? Or
does its irradiation spread across the whole span of the teeth
and in that case, how does it know to stop before bleaching the
tonsils and adenoids the same glist'ning white? Does it bleach
the gums or only turn them a sickly pink? Are these the colours
of the future so far as the innards of the mouth are concerned?

How long before 'Yellow Light' comes on the market, for that
distinctive villain or lowlife look in Hollywood action
pictures and crime drama on tv? Instant and iconic visible
identifiers are required in drama whose heroes and villains
increasingly subscribe to the same code of ethics (or absence
of same). Yellow teeth might work as well as black hats once
did. The more visible idiosyncracies you supply villains
with the more viewers will subtly lean in their direction
philosophically.

That's why it's best to keep the weird inflections, gimpy legs
and such for your repertoire of endearingly hopeless sidekick
types. Then again yellow teeth, like scruffy unkempt facial
growth, might go from being the signifier of a villain, to the
signifier of a rebel against social customs, to a universal
symbol of male sensitivity, virility and lawfully constituted
authority. But a change like that would hardly
happen overnight--it could take months.

I don't know whether the most popular Egyptian tooth
cleansing agent--urine--would be much use in obtaining
this now-fashionable stain. There are disadvantages
which the most powerful mouthwash, even aided by cologne
or aftershave, would be hard put to remedy.

Almost inevitably the next phase would be an indisputably
high-class social marker--one with the stamp of history on
it. 'Black light' could give authority and the upper classes
the same polish it gave Japanese Lords and Ladies in the late
Middle Ages. White teeth--even those slightly yellowed for
rebel effect--would be shunned as what ordinary plebeian
brushing could produce.

But why stop at black if artificial colour's what you want?
Why not red, green, blue, violet--why not all the colours at
once? Be the first on your block with a smile like a rainbow.
There's no trick to it, or if there is--it's only a trick of
the light.

C Martin Heavisides 2006

Abcedary

2007-11-13T07:46:00.001-08:00

Aeolian. Byzantine. Copacetic. Duodenum. Elysium. Feldspar.*
Gelignite. Hymeneal. Iridescent. Jongleur. Kittenwood. Laproscope.
Marmoset. Necrophilia. Omphalos. Peripetaiea. Quirile. Rhodomontade.
Sequipedalian. Tarantella. Ucalyptus.* Vituperate. Widdershins.
Yellowjacket. Zamboni.

*Bet you thought I was going to say 'Firebreak'.
*All right, have it your way--Ukase.

Augustine's Confessions: Noddleheadism

2007-11-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

Augustine's Confessions: Noddleheadism

Blood Clot

2007-11-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

I've been having problems with an infected leg for a while, which as you can imagine is a special challenge if you're a walking courier. Monday I had to go to emergency because it wasn't responding to treatment. At emergency an ultrasound was taken to see if it mightn't be a blood clot instead of an infection. Which it turns out it is, for which reason I have an unexpected week off while I'm treated with daily needle injections of blood thinners. After a week of that I should be on tablets and able to work again, taking some precautions.

I'm going to make use of the time. Read through a few thick books on my shelf. Refamiliarize myself with the art books we have a solid row or two of. See what I can do about putting work up in files and submitting the files I already have up to as many markets as I can. (That'll depend on the ballooning in my leg not getting appreciably worse if I spend an hour with it not elevated--the treatment is lessening that effect though, so I think I'll be able to spend an hour or two a day on concentrated work.)

There's an interesting time paradox to my case. The nurse I saw this morning for my second round of injections wanted to know when exactly I'd come in, because according to the file she had in front of her, I'd come in on November 7, which is tomorrow. If I wasn't waiting six hours yesterday in emergency while I got through the ultrasound, awaited the results, had the results and awaited the needle--my wife went in at one point when I'd been waiting more than an hour after bloodwork, and found out they'd mislaid my case; the doctor came by when I was getting my injection and told us we could go, since I'd already had it--my leg turning a little more zeppelin each hour, if I didn't go through that yesterday as I say, it was certainly an unusually vivid and unpleasant hallucination. Don't look forward to going through it tomorrow.

Alasdair Gray: THE BALLAD OF ANN BONNY

2007-11-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

Alasdair Gray: THE BALLAD OF ANN BONNY

Stupid Song Lyrics

2007-10-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

{a modest compendium; obviously it's scarcely possible to be comprehensive. For the most part I've avoided mentioning howlers like "In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they're only made of clay", because I'm aware that 'stone' or 'rock', which would be correct, doesn't rhyme with the last word of 'Our love is here to stay', and a songwriter has to eat after all}

"Wo-o wo-o, hey hey
I love you more than I can say.
Love you twice as much tomorrow.
Love you more than I can say."
Math and language skills about equally challenged here. If you can't say how much you love somebody, it's a safe bet you can't coherently promise twice as much tomorrow--and why should the object of his affection settle for, at best, half the love he's capable of, today?

I don't know how many times over the years Crosby, Stills, Nash and Yonge have sung "Four Dead in Ohio", or how many times Neil Young has sung it solo. Thousands I'd imagine and in all that time it's never occurred to them that these lines
"Gotta get down to it, soldiers are gunning us down.
Should have been done long ago."
means exactly the opposite of what they intend.

There aren't any intelligent lines in Neil Diamond's "I Am (I Said)" but I think the peak of stupidity is reached by the refrain
"I am, I said, to no-one there
And no-one heard at all, not even the chair."
Which is surprising when you consider what amazingly sensitive ears most chairs have.

The writer of these lines was exceptionally proud of them, since they're the only lyric heard (like it were a needle skipping) on a song running 4 minutes or thereabouts (I was in a bar and my drink wasn't finished, that's why I subjected myself to the nuisance)
"There's things I haven't told you
I go out late at nigh
And if I was to tell you
You'd see my different side."
I'll let that, and this blast from the past, stand in for all those songs whose invention stretches no further than the repetition of one exceedingly stupid lyric 'til you can practically see the drool tricking down the singer's jaw on both sides, and perhaps secretly wish it were copious blood
"I'm a Neanderthal man, you're a Neanderthal girl
Let's make Neanderthal love, in this Neanderthal world"
(I bet somewhere there's an errant Ph.d thesis comparing this lyric, not unfavourably, to the elegant thought twists of Wittgenstein, but stupid academic theses are a whole 'nother issue.)

"Whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn't mean it.
"I just want you back again."
Where do women dig up these bozos? (I don't mean that literally.) And why do so many otherwise intelligent women stick to them like glue? (I suppose the same question can be asked in reverse, and about same sex mismatches, but that doesn't make it any less puzzling.) Assuming the lady he's singing to has a legitimate grievance--and the evidence of these lines is enough for me on that score--the least she should expect is awareness of precisely what she's complaining about, and a particular apology. I'd advise dumping. Shag him one last time for auld lang syne if you must, if his cock's in better repair than his hart and brain, but after that's done, make like the birds and flock off.

'Norwegian Wood' isn't at all a stupid song, but in his last interview Lennon made an amazingly stupid remark about it: "I wanted to write about an affair, but I didn't want me wife to know I was writing about an affair.
"I once had a girl
Or should I say
She once had me."
Really smooth camouflage there, Johnny.

I won't pursue this any further, but I throw the comment board wide open to reader contributions. Please make your quotes as accurate as possible. Cheers.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Baby Talk

2007-10-16T18:56:00.001-07:00

"A ridicule deferred is a ridicule lost forever."
R.A. Lafferty

"Last fall, a Toronto lawyer who works at one of the city's bigger firms asked for two weeks of paternity leave so he could help his wife settle into a routine with their newborn daughter. For that, he was mocked endlessly.
" 'So,' his male colleagues would say, eyebrows cocked, 'paternity leave, huh?'
"This tone suggested no true lawyer would ever do anything so sissified.
" 'It drove me nuts,' says the lawyer, who asked not to be identified."
--Dave McGinn, Nat Post, Oct 16 '07

What follows is a balanced journalistic account of this issue as it works itself out in the contemporary marketplace. You know the drill: follow this example with one from a friendlier work environment, wing in a few more anecdotes and then bring on the sociological observation on how things are changing in the workplace and how further change might be managed. Give me the basic data and I could produce a dozen of these a day, so long as I could repress a constant urge to giggle. (Humour is strictly frowned upon in this sort of think piece, though a think piece without humour is like a rainstorm without water IMHO: it lacks a little something.)

It doesn't seem to have occured to the lawyer--trapped in this anecdote like a fly in amber--that he had at least two responses available to him. The first was to maintain a dignified silence, firm in his own principles. In practice that seems to be out, since he was actually so infirm in his principles that this teasing "drove him nuts" as it would have on the school playground when he was three. In which case what he needs is a quiverful of barbed responses.

He could ask those teasing employees to tell him--quick, off the top of their heads--the names and ages of their children? What milestones in their children's development were they present for and which did they miss? First word, first step, little league, first school performance, first run-in with the law? Right, you were sort of obliged to take notice of that since parents, who on earth knows why, are held somewhat responsible in those cases if their children are not yet of age. Even if, as in your case, involvement was so minimal you could hardly have done or said anything to set them so seriously off on a wrong path. Your part of the joint enterprise was completed by your part in making them. And what's kept you a stranger to your children all these years? Ah right, all those thousands of extra billing hours in Millstadt v. Hagler, which has been in litigation more years than you can count on the fingers of both hands and is unlikely to be resolved in as many more. One or two colleagues whose hobby is literature have taken to calling it Jarndyce and Jarndyce and won't tell you why. Drives you nuts.

Certainly there's nothing the least bit sissy about a man all gwowed up whose life's work is resolving (or resolutely leaving unresolved) the endless hissy fits of corporations. Civilizations have been known to totter and fall over less. But do you never feel you've given over a little more of your heart and soul than--oh now please! the office is no place for that kind of blubbering.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Doris Lessing

2007-10-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

Doris Lessing

This year, for a change, I approve of a Nobel pick--though I got a great kick out of seeing just how underwhelmed Lessing was when told the news. "I've won every bloody prize in Europe, why do you have to bother me like this?" Which might seem like an ungracious response to a microphone stuck in your face out of nowhere when you were peacefully steeping out the back seat of a car, but it's reported Lessing's been on the short list of the Nobel committee for 40 years. (Her story is that 40 years ago she was told the Nobel committee didn't like her. That wore off presumably, or the people who held that opinion died out.) Look over the list of the winners in that period--there certainly aren't any better writers than Doris Lessing on it (supposing that's a possibility) and probably not more than three that are arguably in her class. The writers who might be compared to Lessing are mostly conspicuous by their absence (going right back to the turn of the century) and in many cases--recently, Peter Barnes, R.A. Lafferty, Dennis Potter, Janet Frame--the error can never now be rectified. Assuming the committee is right now on a roll, what about Alasdair Gray next year? If he lasts as long as Lessing has, there's a 14 year window of opportunity, but where's the guarantee of that?

The Golden Notebook's the one everyone talks about, and scarcely needs my recommendation. Read it if you haven't, read it again if you have. Enjoy.

Shikasta may be just as good. (Thomas Disch said in an interview that Lessing's science fiction novels were dreadful, and about the other four I agree with him. One of them is 150 pages of weak rhetoric contending against rhetoric as a corrosion of language. Plato's argument, which she derives hers from, is equally weak but not quite so wordy.

About Shiikasta I'd quarrel with him though. It's a story that freely overleaps centuries and millenia and takes our entire planet for its locale. Here's a passage that stood out for me:

"This woman, this man, restless, irritable, grief-stricken, sleeping too much to forget their situation or unable to sleep, looking everywhere for some good or sustenance that will not at once give way as they reach out for it and slide off into reproach or nothingness--one of them takes a leaf up from the pavement, carries it home, stares at it. There it lies in a palm, a brilliant gold, a curled, curved, sculptured thing, balanced like a feather, ready to float and to glide, there it rests, lightly, for a breath may move it, in that loosely open, slightly damp, human palm, and the mind meditating there sees its supporting ribs, the myriads of its veins branching, and rebranching, its capillaries, the minuscule areas of its flesh which are not--as it seems to this brooding human eye--fragments of undifferentiated veins, but, if one could see them, highly structured worlds, the resources of chemical and microscopic cell life, viruses, bacteria--a universe in each pin-point of leaf. It is already being dragged into the soil as it lies there captive, a shape as perfect as a ship's sail in full wind, or the shell of a snail. But what is being looked at is not this curved exquisite exactness, for the slightest shift of vision shows the shape of matter thinning, fraying, attacked by a thousand forces of growth and death. And this is what an eye tuned slightly, only slightly, differently would see looking out of the window at that tree which shed the leaf on to the pavement--since it is autumn and the tree's need to conserve energy against the winter is on it--no, not a tree, but a fighting seething mass of matter in the extremes of tension, growth, destruction, a myriad of species of smaller and smaller creatures feeding on each other, each feeding on the other, always--that is what this tree is in reality, and this man, this woman, crouched tense over the leaf, feels nature as a roaring creative fire in whose crucible species are born and die and are reborn in every breath . . . every life. . . every culture. . . every world. . . the mind, wrenched away from its resting place in the close visible cycles of growth and renewal and decay, the simplicities of birth and death, is forced back, and back and into itself, coming to rest--tentatively and without expectation--where there can be no rest, in the thought that always, at every time, there have been species, creatures, new shapes of being, making harmonious wholes of interacting parts, but these over and over again crash! are swept away!--crash go the empires, and the civilizations, and the explosions that are to come will lay to waste seas and oceans and islands and cities, and make poisoned deserts where the teeming detailed inventive life way, and where the mind and heart used to rest, but may no longer, but must go forth like the dove sent by Noah, and at last after long circling and cycling see a distant mountaintop emerging from wastes of soiled water, and must settle there, looking around at nothing, nothing but the wastes of death and destruction, but cannot rest there either, knowing that tomorrow or next week or in a thousand years, this mountaintop too will topple under the force of a comet's passing, or the arrival of a meteorite.
. . .
"And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago--and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.
"This, then is the condition of Shikastans now, still only a few, but more and more, and soon. multitudes.

"Nothing they handle or see has substance, and so they repose in their imaginations on chaos, making strength from the possibilities of a creative destruction. They are weaned from everything but the knowledge that the universe is a roaring engine of creativity, and they are only temporary manifestations of it.

"Creatures infinitely damaged, reduced and dwindled from their origins, degenerate, almost lost--animals far removed from what was first envisaged for them by their designers, they are being driven back and back from everything they had and held and now can take a stand nowhere but in the most outrageous extremities of--patience. It is an ironic, and humble, patience, which learns to look at a leaf, perfect for a day, and see it as an explosion of galaxies, and the battleground of species. Shikastans are, in their awful and ignoble end, while they scuffle and scrabble and scurry among their crumbling and squalid artefacts, reaching out with their minds to heights of courage and . . . I am putting the word faith here. After thought. With caution. With an exact and hopeful respect."

Much of Lessing's work remains undiscovered country for me. I think I'll begin by tacking The Four-Gated City again. I've tried reading it through more than once, and while I've gotten through hundred page swatches with considerable pleasure, I've yet to succeed at that. It's about time I did.
If there were no better reason for celebrating than how much this award got up the nose of Mr. Tweed Suited Pretension himself, Harold Bloom, that might be almost enough. But there are far better reasons.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Unconditional Love

2007-10-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

The wide dispersion of this cliche in ordinary speech and on the printed page alarms me. It's usually possible, with divagation, to figure out what people mean by it; but what they mean is never anything resembling unconditional love. Small children might feel that or something very near it, until they're taught to discriminate what's worthy of love and what isn't. (You'd strip a great deal from the school curriculum if that lesson were removed, which would make for a lot of work; you'd have to replace it with things worth learning.) A Buddha perhaps or a figure of perfect enlightenment under under another name (for the sake of argument, let's say Louis Armstrong) might actually be so free and open to all experience as to love unconditionally. But please! "I love my children unconditionally."? Unless you're trying to set a record as a limbo dancer, that's setting the bar awfully low; 'my children' being itself a stated condition.

At a minimum you might speak of loving children unconditionally. To do that wouldn't necessarily make 'my children' an irrelevant distinction, but would certainly somewhat diminish its importance. And are children the only human creatures this teeming globe presents us with? Unconditional love would have to expand enough to include adults as well, and I know by considerable experience they're a far harder test. But where would the children we're to love unconditionally come from, if not the sweaty loins of adults?

And are people the only creatures with whom we share this ample earth? far from it I'd say. There are untold species of plant and animal life we haven't even discovered yet--a new breed of hummingbird was recently found in South America, and put on the endangered species list the same day. You've got to love a guy with a hard luck story like that. Not that there are any shortage of told species--you could probably google the number of distinct species we've catalogued and named, but trust me--the number is immense. The number we've put on endangered species lists is no small potato, nor the number that have grown extinct in the average baby boomer's lifetime. We'd be a lot more actively concerned about that if unconditional love were as thick on the ground as people are in the habit of claiming.

Personally I think we'd do well to act as if we loved all life on earth, even if we were faking it a bit, because all life exists within a complex web of interdependence and we're high on the list of the most dependent. A great many species might be extinguished if we continue or clear-cutting, gas-burning, air and water and land poisoning ways, but one of them will certainly be ours. Possibly as soon as our children's or grandchildren's generation reaches the age of majority. There's no way to love our children unconditionally if we don't love tree frogs, dolphins, fruit flies and house flies, rain forests and all the hyperabundant life that thrives in them. Tell that to the next person you hear boasting of unconditional love for anyone, and tell them I said so.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

African Concept Album

2007-10-03T18:15:00.000-07:00

In a BBC interview Mick Jagger, asked what he might have been if not a rock star, replied: "Maybe I'd be in Africa trying to help a beleaguered economy. Who knows? Or probably an ex-ballet dancer with bad knees." There was no follow-up question apparently. What is it with these slacker interviewers? I think I'd've pointed out to Sir Mick that while a ballet career at his age is probably out of the question--though if he tried it the bad knees would be sure to arrive in short order--a hale and hearty sixty is not at all a bad age to start pitiching in in Africa if this really is a long-repressed dream. Full time or between tours--the Stones are off the road more than they're on it after all. And there's this in favour of the idea--though when it comes to his personal fortune Jagger's reputed both greedy and stingy, he has a far wider practical streak than most of the celebrities who've been making the obligatory three-week junket to save Africa or at least one of its itty-bitty cutey-wooty babies. Jagger's never been a sentimentalist unless on the delicate issue of his male member, and unsentimental sympathy could do a power of good almost anywhere in Africa--anywhere the risk of being on the wrong side of automatic fire or artillery shelling isn't too great. Wouldn't expect a foreigner to risk that, I'd prefer it if Africans didn't have to. Yes, I can almost picture it.

Well it was a thought.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Business by Other Means

2007-09-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

I'm told the head, at the time, of the Krupp family and therefore the Krupp armaments concern submitted a bill to the Allied armies at the end of WWII. It seems an unexploded German bomb, discovered early in the war, revealed to the Allies the superior fuse the Germans employed and they promptly adopted it for their own use. Well! there was clear appropriation if not violation of copyright and patent here so you can imagine. But how to calculate the number of fuses owed for? As surely as severed umbilical cords entail live births, exploded bombs entail exploded fuses.

As it happens, perhaps not unexpectedly, the Krupps were able to calculate the effects of weapons of mass destruction to a fine statistical point. They knew quite precisely the ratio of civilian death to bombs dropped in a terror raid. They erred on the conservative side by a point or two--after all, where calculation is approximate, it's best to give your customer the benefit of the doubt. They were businessmen after all, not thieves.

Flush from recent victory, the Allies felt comfortable violating a legitimate commercial obligation, and simply refused to pay.

There's a lesson to be learned here. As little as patriotic feelings typically inspire what used to be called cartels and are now usually called multinationals, the side of any conflict they wind up on will affect their bottom line. IBM collected throughout the war on the first widescale practical application of the stippled card technique which would ultimately lead to the earliest computers--numbering for administrative purposes the prisoners in the Nazi death camps. (Tattooed on their arms were skin-imprinted replications of the numbers encoded on these stippled cards.) Nazi Germany having collapsed and surrendered with the last payment still due--bankruptcy with extreme prejudice you might say--the final cheque was delivered to an IBM representative by Allied High Command, within the shadow of Bergen-Belsen. Everything has hidden as well as visible costs--worth bearing in mind when you read a story like this online.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Flash Forward: story: Taste Test

2007-09-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

Flash Forward: story: Taste Test

Last News of Peter

2007-09-09T08:46:00.001-07:00

My first experience of Googling was an attempt to learn what
new Peter Barnes projects might be coming up, which instead
led to the discovery that he'd died, suddenly and unexpectedly,
the previous summer; that put me off the service for nearly a
month. When I finally Googled Alasdair Gray it was with fear
and trembling, but last I checked he was doing fine.

There were other, happier surprises. The year before, his
second wife had given birth to triplets, which made him
briefly notorious in the tabs (triplets in your seventies
apparently being news in a way that merely writing a
significant number of the finest plays in the history
of the world is not), and inspired his last, most personal
work, BABIES (posthumously telecast by Granada).

Not long afterward I read that Christopher Fry died at 97
which was a surprise. I hadn't known he was still alive.
Certainly he'd done no new work in decades, even up to
the rather slight standards of his best work such as THE
DARK IS LIGHT ENOUGH.

Peter could have made good use of another 24 years. The amount
of fine work he was doing right up until the end suggests
there was every reason to picture him going on till his
dying day whenever that might be. He even wrote a
masterpiece of criticism in those last years--a study
for the British Film Institute of Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE
OR NOT TO BE. Masterpieces of criticism are far rarer
than masterpieces of drama or fiction because it's not
a requirement, any more than it is for journalism,
that a critic be able to write, and most never learn how to.
(Strictly speaking, it's no more a requirement in drama and
literature, but story-telling is a more primal urge, and
sometimes people will write, even thoughtfully, even
against explicit instructions from publishers
and producers.)

Two passages from this study can be conflated into an informal
artistic credo:

As in all the best comedy, the seriousness is *in* the
comedy, not outside it. Every good joke must be a small
revolution. In the great classic comedies of stage, film
or novel, the jokes and gags themselves contain the deeper
meaning critics crave. . . In the end I believe the only
thing in the theatre that has the ring of truth is comedy.
[. . . ]
Reality is more theatrical than the theatre. It is why
naturalism looks so unreal and comedy so much truer than
tragedy, which sentimentalises violence, misery and death
and poeticises rotting corpses by calling them noble. The
artistic rendering of the physical pain of those who are
beaten down with rifle butts and iron bars contains the
possibility that profit can be squeezed from it. Tragedy
makes the unthinkable appear to have some meaning. It
becomes transfigured, without the horror being removed,
and so justice is denied to the victims. Comedy does not
tell such pernicious lies.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, pp.51-52,
p. 77

C 2005 Martin Heavisides

Grace Paley 1922-2007

2007-08-24T17:39:00.001-07:00

I haven't seen any obituaries yet in the local papers; perhaps I missed them yesterday. I heard the news through one of the offices in an online writer's workshop I belong to. People had memories of Paley as writer, teacher, activist--one even mentioned a reading he had attended where Paley had read some of her poetry. He'd often heard poets read their own verse badly, and all too often heard bad poetry read badly. It was refreshing to hear fine poetry read well.

I'll have to take his judgment of her merit as a poet on faith until I've read a little more of it. The only poem of hers I've read was a droning, agitpropish piece that sent me resolutely back to the astonishing wit, depth, breadth and tenderness of her short stories. I'd be happy to discover that poem was a rare or even unique misstep, and she'd discovered as fresh and original a voice in her poetry as in her fiction. It certainly doesn't surprise me that a writer with such precise command of speech rhythms would read her own work well.

Her body of work was small, but the ratio of successes to failures was very high--more like a golden glove fielder's than a winning pitcher's percentage. For that reason many far more prolific writers have produced considerably less that is likely to endure--for as long at least as humanity, and literacy as a human skill, endures.

C 2207 Martin Heavisides

Movie & TV Quiz Answers

2007-08-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

Though I half hate to post this list now I'm getting people offering their answers, I suspect that process has run its course very nearly. (It took the threat of posting my answers to bring anyone out in the first place.) Anyway, these are the answers, some of which you have indeed guessed:

1. "Can you lend me a rope so I can swing a fellow out where I can get a better shot at him?" Buster Keaton, in Our Hospitality, has fallen in love with a woman he doesn't know is part of a family his family were feuding with in the Old South. His father and brother learn his identity while he is under their roof, so there's a problem about shooting him on the spot, but once they get him out of the house and running free, he's fair game. Keaton has fallen over a cliff and is trapped on a ledge when one of the brothers makes this request of a prospector with a well loaded burro.

2. "General--you go down there." As Grace guessed, Little Big Man.

3. "She's my sister AND my daughter. Do you understand--or is it too tough for you?" Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) in Chinatown. (This one was copiously guessed.)

4. "Why why why WHY was he wearing a ballet sssKIRT Charles?" As Grace discovered by technological means, a line from The Ruling Class. The Archbishop, usually referred to as Bertie, and played well past his considerable comic potential by Alastair Sim. Peter Barnes, the playwright, remarks in the commentary for the Criterion edition that the part as written in the play is funny, but as played by Sim it's ten times funnier. He turns a supporting role into a leading part simply by the exuberance of his playing. (This line in the play is "Why was he wearing a ballet skirt, Charles?" I don't know if this influenced Peter Barnes in developing the character of Carlos with his characteristic stammer in Barnes' next major play The Bewitched: "Why why why WHY do I ssssuffer?") Barnes adds that it's quite common in the theatre for people to turn a lesser part into a lead by force of presentation, but rare in film because editing tends to trim such flights--and in fact every version of The Ruling Class I've ever seen that was trimmed for length had much less of Sim's sheer manic exuberance as Archbishop Bertie.

5. "That's not a single malt whisky. It's some kind of a . . . polymalt!" (Corrected reading.) Doyle, the half demon/half human who becomes Angel's first assistant when he moves to L.A. on the series Angel (a spinoff from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). After mighty exertion he ask for a shot of single malt whisky and Angel gives him what's on the premises, which of course is a blended scotch. As is frequently the case on both Buffy and Angel, a charcter searching for a correct word and not finding it, comes up with a substitute which is comically/poetically apt.

6. "There was me, that is Alex" etc. This was generally recognized; the opening line of A Clockwork Orange.

7. "We're screwed."
"We're way past screwed. We're so far past screwed the light from screwed taqkes a billion years to reach us." An exchange between Dan and Roseanne Connor as the consequences of a bad financial decision sink in. A good number of people who've always avoided Roseanne would be surprised at how sharp, witty and literate the scripts generally are.

8. "Success to crime." A toast proposed by Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon.

9. "So these staged suicides of yours are for your mother's benefit?"
"No. (Long pause.) I would not say benefit." Exchange between Harold (Bud Cort) and his psychiatrist in Harold and Maude.

10. "C.K. Dexter-Haven. . . either I'm going to punch you in the jaw or you're going to punch me in the jaw."
"Perhaps we should flip for it."
Exchange between Mike (Jimmy Stewart) and Dex (Cary Grant) in The Philadelphia Story.
(Sorry Grace, not Groucho, but he's on this list.)

11. "So who do you like as the killer?" I'm sorry I don't remember the name of the assistant who says this to the Mexican police captain played by Charlton Heston in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. See the restored print. Accept no substitutes.

12. "They have you shot twice in the tabloids."
"It's not true. Never came near my tabloids."
Exchange between Nora Charles (Myrna Loy) and her husband Nick (William Powell) in The Thin Man.

13. "Why do you realize if there were no closets, there'd be no coats, and if there were no coats there'd be no hooks, and if there were no hooks there'd be no fish and that would suit me just fine."
Groucho avoiding the subject of how he came to be in a lady's closet in Monkey Business.

14. "So get out there and lie like dogs and if Willow doesn't miff all her lines like she did in a rehearsal, this'll be the best high school production ever of Death of a Salesman."
As Grace guessed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) is directing a High School drama production in Willow's dream. (Very intricate episode involving Willow, Xander, Giles and Buffy in individual dreams which meld into a collective one.) I figured anyone familiar with the series, even if they didn't remember this line, would get it just from the name 'Willow'.

15. "So that ebola virus--that's really got to suck right?" Grace guessed The Outbreak, which I haven't seen, but I heard this line (and it's the only really funny line I've ever heard, though my knowledge of the show isn't encyclopedic) on an episode of Friends. Maybe they lifted it from The Outbreak, as they lifted the head engulfing turkey from Mr. Bean on another episode.

16. "Watch how you're driving!"
"Am I driving?"
Exchange between the Little Tramp and the millionaire who's his bosom buddy when drunk, but doesn't recognize him when sober, in City Lights. Charlie, in panic at the news, grabbs the steering wheel double handed.

17. "How do you say 'drugstore' in French?"
"Le. . . Drugstore."
Exchange between a pretty young American tourist in Paris and Jacques Tati's M. Hulot, in the movie Playtime.

18. "My my my. . . nipples explode with delight. My my my. . . hovercraft is covered with eels." As Grace guessed, John Cleese of Monty Python, impersonating a Hungarian trying to make himself understood in English with a phrasebook he doesn't know is seriously misleading.

19. "I'll give you exactly ten minutes to get your hands off my balls." The neo-Nazi Schillinger's response to what some might consider an overfamiliar gesture of reacquaintance by Ross, a prisoner he knew before, re-arrested and sent to Emerald City in the maximum security facility called Oswald Penitentiary (Oz for short), which is also the name of the series this touching example of tender human contact is drawn from.

20. "Try to break into my house. . . I ought to blow you away. I got to tell you the truth--the only reason I don't is 'cause somebody might hear me."
Dennis Hopper as Ripley, the title character in Wim Wenders' The American Friend. These are almost the first lines he speaks, and quite characteristic.

8 1/2

2007-07-23T16:35:00.000-07:00

Carol Novack has invited me to a game of revelation tag. These are the rules: 1. The rules must be posted by each participant at the beginning of the post. 2. Each player posts 8 facts about himself/herself. 3. Tagged parties post their own 8 items in a blog, and post these rules. 4. At the end of the blog, each player or 'tagee' must post the names of eight people s/he is tagging in turn. 5. And inform said tagees by e-mail, telegraph wire or telepathy if blessed with such ability, but in any case inform them or they'll have trouble participating.

My random facts:

1. I've frequently entertained the suspicion that I'm not who I think I am. In some ways this is the story of the human race.

2. The first time I saw newborn kittens I thoght they were mice.

3. I read window signs, billbords, poster boards and graffitti tags for clues to the zeitgeist. "Aeon 101." A young girl from the front of whose jeans the sun spectacularly rises. (Lois Jeans, I think that one was.) "Honest Ed's an honest man. People look at him and say 'Honest, is this a man?' " How microscopic would such examination have to be to achieve total insight? How macroscopic? "Our prices will make you come."

4. I recently started a blog, The Evitable. My secret plan is to use it as a base from which to become a presence in the world of ideas and maybe eventually make a few bucks. So far, my progress is, regrettably, easy to gauge.

5. Picasso couldn't learn arithmetic as a child because the number 7 looked like an upside down nose to him. I wonder what my excuse was? (I don't even know why I'm saying this, except that it's classic schtick. I was actually pretty good with numbers. Certainly very attentive to figures, once I noticed girls had 'em.)

6. I love classic schtick.

7. I work as a walking courier. I have pages and pages of material towards a Catch-22 of the courier business, but I won't have the free time to pull it into shape as long as I continue working full time as a courier.

8. There's no reason, apart from universal human destruction or sudden widespread disinterest, that this chain of octopedal personal data entries should ever cease. Curious what people will be posting in a thousand years' time. Better get a good health plan installed pronto if I want to find out.

8 1/2. I was never any good at colouring between the lines. I wonder if Michelangelo had the same problem.

The people I'm tagging are:

1. Nonnie Augustine.
2. Andrew Tibbett.
3. J.A. McDougall.
4. G.C. Smith.
5. David Coyote.
6. chancelucky.
7. Antonios Maltezos.
8. Anne Chudobiak.

Movie and TV Lines and Poly Lines

2007-07-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

[an interactive: post your guesses in comments and in a week or two, if they haven't all been guessed correctly, I'll post the answers.
I'm quoting from memory, so I won't vouch for 100% verbatim accuracy. Also I'm quoting one or two dialogue title lines from the silent era.]

1. "Can you lend me a rope so I can swing a fellow out where I can get a better shot at him?"

2. "General--you go down there."
"And I suppose you're telling me there aren't any Indians down there?"
"Oh no. There are thousands of Indians down there. And them ain't helpless women and children, but Cheyenne braves and Sioux. When they get through with you there won't be nothing left but a greasy spot. General--you go down there, if you got the nerve."

3. "She's my sister AND my daughter. Do you understand--or is it too tough for you?"

4. "Why why why why WHY was he wearing a ballet ss-sKIRT Charles?"

5. "That's not a single malt whisky! It's a, a . . . polymalt!"

6. "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogies, that is Georgie, Petey and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

7. "We're screwed."
"We're way past screwed. We're so far past screwed, the light from screwed takes a billion years to reach us."

8. "Success to crime."

9. "So these staged suicides of yours are for your mother's benefit?"
"No. (Long pause.) I would not say benefit."

10. "C.K. Dexter-Haven. . . either I'm going to punch you on the jaw or you're going to punch me on the jaw."
"Perhaps we should flip for it."

11. "So who do you like as the killer?"

12. "They have you shot twice in the tabloids."
"That's a lie. Never came near my tabloids."

13. "Why do you realize if there were no closets, there'd be no coats and if there were no coats, there'd be no hooks, and if there were no hooks there'd be no fish and that would suit me just fine."

14. So get out there and lie like dogs and if Willow doesn't miff all her lines like she did in rehearsal, this'll be the best High School production ever of Death of a Salesman.

15. "So that ebola virus--that's really got to suck, right?"

16. "Watch how you're driving!"
"Am I driving?"

17. "How do you say 'drugstore' in French?"
"Le. . . Drugstore."

18. "My my my . . . nipples explode with delight. My my my. . . hovercraft is covered with eels."

19. "I'll give you exactly ten minutes to get your hands off my balls."

20. "Try to break into my house--I ought to blow you away. I got to tell you the truth. . . the only reason I don't is 'cause somebody might hear me."

L.B.o.C., his Life of Crime?

2007-07-14T17:04:00.001-07:00

Some of the commentary running up to the verdict seems a little overblown. Yet another piece (by Linda Diebel, who usually has better things to occupy her mind) on whether Lady Black will cut and run if Conrad is sent to Durance Vile? Evidence suggests it's unlikely, (which is L.D.'s conclusion as well), since she hasn't already, in any case why speculate? We'll know soon enough. But this passage simply jumps the shark:

"The horror, the horror," said Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, and there is no question that Lady Black has peered into the same black maw. (Will she even remain Lady Black now there is pressure in Britain to strip Black of his peerage?)
--Linda Diebel, Toronto Star, July 14 '07

I have to doubt whether Barbara or Conrad (both of whom have cracked a fair number of books) would be in the least impressed by the sheer inept bathos of this literary allusion. Surely if anyone Lord Black, who's the one potentially doing time, would be facing that black maw. But culpable memories of massacres, with heads left on pikes for a demonstration? By no stretch of the imagination is Black contemplating a life gone so desperately far off its initial moral compass (such as it was) as that, and analogy with the Lady Black is even more farfetched. Kurtz's terror in the face of a death that resembled the death-in-life he'd descended to, had to be more considerable than Barbara Amiel Black's at being possibly subtracted from the nobility section of the British social register. (I must say they're getting finicky if Lord Black of Crossharbour's in danger of being crossed off their list. Time was if you wanted anything from a knighthood up, you'd pretty much better have ten to twenty years as a cutthroat pirate on your resume. Now suddenly it's the twenty first century and what? a mere conviction for fraud's enough to get you struck off their honour roll?)

Maybe the same can be said of a think piece on whether his upcoming sentence, if severe as the law allows, would be "cruel and unusual punishment". This, as they say in courtroom drama, calls for speculation. Will Bush pardon him as he did Scooter Libby? This is about the most ludicrous of the suggestions I've heard (and hasn't been made, to the best of my knowledge, in print--I heard it in elevator conversation). a) There's no political hook to a pardon for Lord Black; b) the Bush administration does favours for American citizens, not the Canadian or British variety; c) do you really imagine the two are at all close? I certainly wouldn't assert with definacy that Bush has never been on the guest list at a Black party, but I hardly think he'd have been seated above the salt. Politics makes strange cocktail mixers, but Lord Black and a man of whom it's darkly rumoured that one time, in the distant past, he spoke aloud a sentence of his own devising that was coherent and syntactically correct from beginning to end? in consideration of which he was allowed to graduate Yale? I can't see Bush and Black ever having been really tight.

But James Stribopoulous (quoted by Tracey Tyler, Toronto Star, July 14 '07) has a point:
"I don't think someone like Black, who is a nonviolent, first-time offender should go to jail for the rest of his life."
(Which is likely? Don't know, but it's certainly possible.)

Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say Ken Lay or his cronies-in-fraud at Enron were non-violent criminals, not when shareholders and employees lost every penny they had and were hobbled with debt besides, only because they took these gentlemen at their word. I don't think the despicable hooligans behind the S&L scandal were nonviolent criminals either: you'd be hard-pressed to find a gangbanger as icily calm in his violence. But if Conrad Black was guilty of fraud, he wasn't guilty of defrauding people whose losses stripped them of houses and possessions and faced them with the live prospect of starving, or eking out scanty livings begging on our notoriously charitable streetcorners. Someone refresh my memory, how many years on average did the S&L criminals spend in jail? How much of the money they'd casually appropriated and squandered were they required to restore to their destitute victims? How many of those victims survive to this day on the kindness of strangers and the warmth on cold nights of sewer grates, and how many no longer survive? no: on that scale Conrad Black certainly isn't a violent criminal. In my view the only reason for ever imprisoning anyone for fraud is that the proceeds are most often too widely and thoroughly dispersed for restitution to be made. Proper penalty in a case of this kind would be full payback plus perhaps a fine of ten percent of the amount of the misappropriation as determined by court of law. Jail time on top of that? useless expense to the state, adds to the problem of congestion in prisons, gains us nothing except an easy satisfaction of our punitive, hence highly moral values. The fact that there might be 10,000 people in prison , poorer, less well-represented at trial*, who it's equally useless to imprison gives no reasonable grounds to make Conrad Black the 10,0001st.

*Now wait a minute--let's think this through. Good representation in Conrad Black's case? Expensive representation for sure, but Edward Greenspan's win record in court would be a mediocre batting average.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Happy Birthday, Ula

2007-07-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

It's my niece Ula's birthday today. She's the closest Marysia and I will ever have to a daughter, and once or twice I've made the Freudian slip of calling her that. We commemorated the occasion by a visit to the AGO and after to a blues jam at the Rex in her name. Would have taken her along, but she seemed to think the distance between Brussels and Toronto was an insurmountable obstacle. Haven't we taught that girl teleportation yet?

Last year we visited New York when she was dancing there. Not one of her own projects--she was hired, working with four dancers from the New York City Ballet. We had a long dinner with her the last night, Wieisia, Marysia and I. Her mother Wieisia was sitting across the table from her. I was sitting across the table from Marysia, so Ula was seated to my left. She gave a sigh of weariness at one point and plopped her head on my shoulder to rest. I remembered a similar gesture when she was nine.

{Happy Birthday from Bernini AGO. We just saw a fine show of his sculptures. After Bernini we went to the Rex, to celebrate your Birthday with B.B. King Blues/Jazz. Love Marysia.}

Down Among the Dead

2007-07-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

R.A. Lafferty wrote once (I quote from memory, but I'm pretty sure I have the essential gist): "People will tell you words are opposites when they are not even related. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial; the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Therefore I am a radical liberal conservative." Which is a pretty tall order to fill, but at least a coherent political philosophy. Segment them and what do you get? Conservatives so in love with destruction they have nightly wet dreams of world-immolating Armaggedon; Liberals who with the Heinz fortune or McCartney's billion at their disposal, will pinch a penny 'til the copper melts and streams at their feet; Radicals who lose their train of thought completely in the middle of an ordinary sentence,only to save the day by a quick cry of "Right on!" "Fight the power!" or "Whatever." And damned if the lot of them won't squeal like stuck pigs if you try to deny them the medal, educational distinction or merit badge they prefer. Divorce words from their meanings that thoroughly and a functional illiterate can call himself an education president; an actor can fly, at the brink of war, on a mission of his own devising and give a more credible performance than most professional diplomats, because he's a better actor, and the professionals have no diplomatic skills; sincerity become the irony of the new millenium; democracy, theocracy, plutocracy and secret government become interchangeable synonyms (not to mention technocracy, consumerism, warcraft and social vision); voices rise to swell grand auditoria, perfectly satisfying every hearer except those few troubled by not being able to make out a single word of what is said; the lies people tell become particular badges of honour; they substitute second-rate t-shirt slogans for philosophies of thought and action (which take far too long to test and compile); the real world becomes a billboard campaign, with colours bled and tonal values values randomly transposed, sometimes for fiscal, sometimes for artistic reasons; gibberish replaces gold as universal coin of the realm; flames leap from window to window while overeager commentators zealously interview the laid-out rows of smouldering corpses (you'd think they'd notice at least the briquet colouring and toasty condition--steam rising from the charred mouth instead of words? I'd call that a dead giveaway but I guarantee: learned theses will emerge from transliterations of the steam).

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Geronimo

2007-07-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

I have to thank the National Post columnist who casually libelled Geronimo in a think piece (July 4) on the First Nations Day of Action on June 29. (See Colonials.) I didn't reply on that subject at the time because my knowledge of Geronimo was superficial, but the catch-up reading I've done since has been fascinating. I don't know enough yet to give more than a thumbnail sketch, but I can say the evidence I've encountered scarcely supports a charge of ruthlessness and implacability against Geronimo--far more against the adminstrations he made war on.

He was certainly a rough warrior. I'm not thrilled (as one example) with his account of killing four Mexican peasants. It isn't made any prettier by the fact that there was nobody in that war party (Spanish Territory, 1858) who wasn't raw over the recent murder by Spanish soldiers of somebody close to them--in Geronimo's case, his mother, wife and three children--none of these last, given the date of his marriage, could have been older than 11. Posit yourself as an adult soldier of the Spanish crown, charged with the murder of three children that age and younger. Legitimate act of war? Discuss. And these were only Geronimo's immediate family, this was a close-knit tribal community, it's unlikely there were many among the helplessly butchered who hadn't been known and in some way dear to him.

None of that makes the killing of farmers unaffiliated with the army a justifiable act. I don't even think it made sense tactically. Odds are these peasants owed a life of oppression and a few graves of their own loved ones to the kind ministrations of the crown--they might easily have been recruitable.

There are three things I don't find in the record of Geronimo's wars, and I'll accept correction and duly note it if anyone can point to counter-evidence that proves me wrong. I don't find a single campaign undertaken by Geronimo under less provocation than an atrocity committed against his people. I don't find a case where he met a band of brothers, weary of war and of wandering to escape further provocation to war, and lulled them with soft words the better to set them up for ambush and slaughter. I certainly find no evidence that he made war by preference on unarmed men, women and children who had no reason, until the sudden appearance of horses, guns and glistening sabres, to suspect they were anything but safely at peace. All three can be unequivocally charged against both the Spanish Crown and the U.S. government in their dealings with the Indians of the plains.

Far from being implacable, Geronimo more than once tried to reach an honourable accomodation with territorial adminstrations, and would have succeeded if he'd ever met one administrator who was a man of honour. I don't say it would have been impossible to find one, but I can't say it's surprising, after so many frustrations, that Geronimo grew tired of looking. From what's known of his character, it's very likely he would never have taken up arms again if the words of peace spoken to the Apaches at Apache Tejo (U.S. Territory, 1863) had been genuine rather than a calculated move in a despicable act of betrayal.

I suppose it could be argued that if the territorial adminstration was as ruthless as I've suggested, they would have hanged him unceremoniously at his last surrender. I suspect the administration would have been happy to do that if public opinion would have allowed it, but in fact it wasn't usual to hang or even jail enemy combatants who had honourably surrendered. The imprisonment at hard labour of Geronimo and his remnant band was a violation of the terms of surrender. Robert E. Lee wasn't imprisoned and put to hard labour at his surrender, and Lee's brilliant generalship considerably prolonged a far more devastating insurrection than Geronimo's, with far less justification at its core. Geronimo was not fighting to preserve a slave empire.

I'd guess the administration figured they could avoid the time, trouble and possibly embarrassing publicity of a trail and hanging, by quietly working Geronimo to death. He was nearly sixty, which is a lot older in 19th century years than in ours. He double-crossed them by living to be eighty and telling his own story in his own words. Words always rich in their cadence, and at the height of their sonority reminiscent of a Cathedral bell.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Renoir at the National Gallery, Ottawa

2007-07-08T06:38:00.002-07:00

I was pleasantly surprised by the Renoir exhibition at the National Gallery. With the best will in the world I find it hard to regard most of Renoir as anything but superior decoration, and perhaps the reason is he's most famous for portraits. With the exception of one interesting self-reflexive piece in this show--a canvas showing a landscape with a painter, off to the side, painting it (this being Monet)--the figures in his drawings are stiff, overposed, not sensitively handled. But most of them are pure landscape and he shows far more sensitivity in portraying earth, water, sun and the elements moving through it. I wrote down impressions of the paintings that particularly struck me:

Laundry Boat on the Seine near Paris (1871) grey, wintry scene--blackish brown boat, touched up here and there with white, bobbing on grey water. The sidenote speculates that it was painted during the period of the commune (Mar.-May 1871) which would mean winter was hanging in that year. It's certainly a scene full of sympathy for ordinary workers such as might have joined the communards at the barricades if they'd been in Paris. Luckily he is able to portray their situation indirectly, since if he'd painted the family living on the boat they'd likely have come out like the extremely posed couple in

La Promenade 1870 Man in working clothes gives hand to woman to help her up path. Not a very exciting canvas.

Duck Pond 1873 (1) Pink sky exploding behind leaved and partly leaved trees along the bank of a river. Ducks on the pond perfect flutterballs of white with black crowns. (2) I was mistaken. The pink sky is the roof of a house otherwise barely visible, but more so in the second study (roof now orange). Mix of ducks and swans on the pond (the black crowned white feathered birds in the previous scene being, perhaps, Dwans.)

Claude Monet Painting at His Garden at Argenteuil (c. 1873) Self-reflexive, technique mirrors Monet's. (Same might be said of the two Duck Ponds. Mostly Renoir worked alone, but in that case he and Monet were painting side by side.)

The Bridge at Chateau c. 1875 Sunlight on a river, bridge and town behind pauses to have its picture taken (much the same might be said of Les Grands Boulevard and La Square de la Trinite, same year).

The Wave 1879 Waterscape, no land visible. Portrait of a storm. (The Wave 1882 is far less interesting, a mess of paint in search of a point of view.)

Landscape at Wargemount 1879 Orgy of colour, red deepening to purple, orange, amber, controlled firebursts, everything, the greens particularly, heightened as colour is under partly overcast sky especially if there has recently been rain.

Wheatfield 1879 Again brilliant colours (subdued ripples of gold through the light brown of the wheatfield predominating in foreground) under a moody sky full of assembling/dispersing clouds.

I hope somebody other than Renoir titled Lady With Parasol and a Small Child--it seems an odd order to put them in.

Algerian Landscape "The Ravine of the Wild Woman" 1881 Spiky blue aloes in foreground, background an indiscriminate sweep of bushes and flowers, all alight, all swaying under the force of wind? heat haze? Dizzy uphill perspective.

The Jardin d'Essai, Algiers 1881 Eloquent palms, brown with bursts or red or (the new growth ones nearer earth) verdant green, accompany their shadows across the parched sand on a promenade.

Banks of the Seine 1880-81 Pink sky traverses groves of willows and poplars to reappear as pink sheen on water, crosses wild sprays and thickets of bush and early growth forest to become a pink pathway through.

Fog on Guernsey 1883 Another study of light breaking through obscuring elements with powerful force. (Fog visible mainly over the water, not unlike puffs of steam above a tea kettle.)

The Bay of Naples (Morning) 1881 Mist burning off at sunrise. Complicated crisscross patterns of ships with furled sails in the harbour. Volcano smoking just to the left of centre in background?

Rocky Crags at L'Estaque 1882 As in others of his paintings, trees bursting with leaves above trunks that are vivid red. The hills a near white, interposed by what must be growths of forest or bush, but read at this distance like stands of moss or lichen.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

What Were They Thinking?

2007-07-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

{as before, there's at least a fifty-fifty chance these are principally the fault of mechanical proofreading systems}

We need First Nations to have reified present-day native-led nations in the real geography of the land.
---Robert Priest, Now, June 28-July 4, '07

Surely it's the reification, or something like it, of the nations and their land claims that native groups chiefly complain of? Only by actually writing this sentence could you remove all of its muddle, but 'ratify' instead of 'reify' would at least give it the dignity of a conventional lamely-worded platitude. (I recommend checking out Drew Hayden Taylor's piece in the same issue.)

"What is the Captain's name of the boat in the musical Showboat?"
--Trivial Pursuit Question, Timothy's Chalkboard, June 29 '07

I'm not even sure what the question is: what is the Captain's name? What is the name of the boat? Or does the Captain have a name of his own for the boat, different from the one she's commonly known by? "Her name was McGill/And she called herself Lil/But everyone knew her as Nancy."

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Colonials

2007-07-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

"In the studio, [native activist Terry Nelson] favours a T-shirt sporting an image of the ruthless Apache warrior Geronimo above the slogan: "Homeland security. Fighting Terrorism since 1492."

I confess to foreboding at the term 'terrorists' being attached to white colonizers. Along with its false revisionist branding of Eurpoeans' intentions and policies, not to mention pre-emptive self-exculpation for possible future reprisals in kind, the word speaks to a reckless sensibility with an itchy trigger finger. By extension, I sense in Nelson's identification with Geronimo, whose diehard refusal to recognize the American government resulted in years of futile Intifada-style bloodlettings, a romantic intoxication with an ideological zeitgeist that justifies random violence amongst the world's (soi-disant or actually) colonized."

--Barbara Kay, Nat Post, July 4 '07

Revisionist. I'd certainly never suspected Barbara Kay of closet Bolshevist sympathies. I wonder if we can soon look forward to her blueprint for a new Gulag?

Columbus began the European colonization of the 'new world'--though he certainly didn't discover for Europe lands whose banks Europeans had been fishing for two generations already. It's not entirely relevant to his role as imperialist that he was an appallingly bad sailor and navigator--men refused to sail with him until he had hired a competent navigator, Martin Pinson, for fear he'd smash his ships, and he did manage to sink the Santa Maria through incompetence, Pinson barely saving the Nina and Pinta. Not entirely relevant, but satisfying to record just the same. What is relevant is that his forthright intention was to grapple to himself as much wealth as possible, gold being his chief preference; his policy for achieving this to enslave whole peoples and set them in to digging. This intention and policy--broadened, sophisticated and improved with hypocritical gloss "We appropriate other's lands and weath and enslave their persons for their own good, as part of the great work of civilization"--became the prototype for dedicated European colonizers in the new world. Swift's incomparable two paragraph anatomy of empire building near the close of Gulliver's Travels cannot have been intended merely as a portrait of Columbus, but fits his method in every detail, and his biography in all but one: I don't believe Columbus had ever been a pirate as the vast majority of empire builders, up to and somewhat beyond Swift's day, were at first, until they found a crown-approved legitimate outlet for their greed, rapacity and cool killer's temperament. Would I call Columbus a terrorist? no. A thief, yes, a conniver, sycophant and terrifying bully, a mass murderer himself and the inspirator of mass murders by others--I'd call him all that as well as the very model of a Eurpoean colonizer.

Andrew Jackson--the first of the truly implacable demonizers of America's native peoples, who was certainly one of many reasons there were Indian nations who would fight to the death against impossible odds rather than recognize any American government--wouldn't call him a terrorist either. With his revolution of the rich against the poor, slaveholders against slaves and those who sought to free them, with his fevered efforts to exterminate every Indian on American soil, man, woman and child, I'd call him a preliminary sketch for Hitler. You see? if we put on our thinking caps and let them massage and stretch the muscles of our minds, it's possible to find terms fitted to almost any occasion in the lexicon of abuse, without falling back on hackneyed cliches-of-the-day such as 'terrorist'.

Or 'revisionist', a term time's turned soft and mushy, though to be called it has sometimes been a death sentence in the fairly recent past. I've never seen anybody use it who wasn't trying to paper over an historical argument and hide its present implications, while trying to give the appearance of the utmost conscientious attention. As it is here, since Ms. Kay offers no opinion on the intentions and policies of colonialism--as you see I have offered mine here--only contends a t-shirt thesis on the subject is oversimplified. I have to say I haven't read many t-shirt slogans that aren't oversimplified, or met many people who are really prepared to go to the wall for the truth of what's printed on their casual summer outerwear.

The First Nations' Day of Action was not even a rude interruption of business as usual, but a polite and barely discernible one. As for the remark Barbara Kay quoted that alarmed her most--"There are only two ways of dealing with the white man. One, either you pick up a gun, or you stand between the white man and his money"--even though I haven't any money and therefore would get the shitty end of the deal, I can't say it alarms me much more than the similar rhetoric of the Black Panthers in the '60s, though if I were First Nation by birth and familiar with that period it would alarm me---rhetoric like that got a number of Panthers killed, as well as blacks unconnected to the movement but in the line of fire. It's nowhere near as offensive as "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," and there've been Canadians who believed and acted on that motto, and whole American administrations that had no other response to the Native question. One of these is permanently memorialized on the U.S. $20 bill.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Peter Barnes

2007-07-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

{in (just a few of) his own words}

So what was I trying to do in these plays? I wanted to write a roller-coaster drama of hairpin bends; a drama of expertise and ecstasy balanced on a tightrope between the comic and tragic with a mult-faceted fly-like vision where every line was dramatic and every scene a play in itself; a drama with a language so exact it could describe what the flame of a candle looked like after the candle had been blown out and so high-powered it could fuse telephone wires and have a direct impact on reality; a drama that made the surreal real, that went to the limit, then further, with no dead time, but with the speed of a seismograph recording an earthquake. . . a drama glorifying differences, condemning heirarchies, that would rouse the dead to fight, always in the forefront of the struggle for the happiness of all mankind, an anti-boss drama for the shorn not the shearers.
. . .
At times I feel I could not track an elephant in six feet of snow, but at least I have provided a good home for scores of old jokes who had nowhere else to go. I have laughed a lot when I did not feel a lot like laughing, and of course I have made a mess of my life, but then I have made a mess of all my shirts. I write hoping to make the world a little better and perhaps to be remembered. The latter part of that statement is foolish, as I can see, quite plainly, the time when this planet grows cold and the Universe leaks away into another Universe and the Cosmos finally dies and there is nothing but night and nothing. It's the end, but that is never a good enough reason for not going on. A writer who does not write corrupts the soul. Besides, it is absurd to sit around sniffing wild flowers when you can invent them, and new worlds.
---Barnes Plays One, pp. viii-ix

13th Earl of Gurney: Touched him, saw her, towers of death and silence, angels of fire and ice. Saw Alexander covered with honey and beeswax in his tomb and felt the flowers growing over me. A man must have his visions. How else could an English judge and peer of the realm take moonlight trips to Marrakesh and Ponders End? See six vestal virgins smoking cigars? Moses in bedroom slippers? Naked bosoms floating past Formosa? Desperate diseases need desperate remedies. (Glancing towards the door.) Just time for a quick one. (Places noose over his head again.) Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man. There's plenty of time to win this game, and thrash the Spaniards too. (Draws his sword.) Form squares men! Smash the Mahdi and Binnie Barnes!

(With a lustful gurgle he steps off.But this time he knocks over the steps. Dangling helpless for a second he drows the sword and tries to tear the noose free, gesturing frantically.)

. . .

14th Earl of Gurney: My heart rises with the sun. I'm purged of doubts and negative innuendoes. Today I want to bless everything! Bless the crawfish that has a scuttling walk, bless the trout, the pilchard and periwinkle. Bless Ted Smoothey of 22 East Hackney Road--with a name like that he needs blessing. Bless the mealy-redpole, the black-gloved wallabye and W.C. Fields, who's dead but lives on. Bless the skunk, bless the red-bellied lemur, bless 'Judo' Al Hayes and Ski-Hi-Lee. Bless the snotty-nosed giraffe, bless the buffalo, bless the Society of Women Engineers, bless the wild yak, bless the Picadilly Match King, bless the pygmy hippo, bless the weasel, bless the mighty cockroach, bless me. Today's my wedding day!
--from The Ruling Class

Carlos: Has Christ died that children might starve?
And whole towns made poor t'raise up the merchants' walls
(They turn bread t' stones; the Devil'd more charity,
Turning stones t' bread; 'tis no wonder men worship him).
Why shouldst some ha' surfeit, others go hungry?
One man two coats, another go naked?
Now I see Authority's a poor provider
No blessings come from 't
No man born shouldst ha' 't, wield 't.
Authority's the Basilisk, the crowned dragon
Scaly, beaked and loathsome.
Born from a cock's egg, hatched under a toad
Its voice is terror, glance, certain death.
Streams where 't drank once are poisoned
And the grass around turns black.
'Twill make a desert o' this world
Whilst there's still one man left t' gi' commands
And another who'll obey 'em.
Release all suspects!
I'm not bewitched or possessed,
'Cept t' right the wrongs done my people.
I'll show you the good life, if you'll show me pardon
F'not knowing thy needs and miseries.
I raise my hat t'you three times in courtesy.
---from The Bewitched

Lilly: Their first question was, 'Is there intelligent life on earth?' I thought for a long time before answering that question. I still believe it was a trick. With their vast powers they would've known whether there was or not. Anyway I finally answered choosing my words with care, 'Yes. . . you could say there was intelligent life on earth.' I wasn't going to be caught making wild generalizations. They must've thought the reply satisfactory because they asked me there and then if I'd help the cause of Cosmic Uplifting by becoming their P.T.M.R.C.
. . .
It seemed strange at first conducting Operation 'Dog Star Evening Star' from 14a Willowside Avenue, East Sheen. For in this world-spread spiritual operation twenty four mountains in countries from Peru to Tibet, from the Rockies to Fiji were charged, through me, as New Space Centres. I made these mountains great batteries of power which would radiate through the world thus renewing the vital psychic energy banks of Mother Earth. Instructed by the Alphan High Governors I was able to recharge the Earth's batateries by supreme mental concentration and silent prayer. In Cosmic time this Solar Recharging lasted some five years or 1 1/2 minutes in Earth time. The mental concentration demand was enormous but so was the importance of the operation. One miscalculation and it would've turned out a failure, vast worlds would've been thrown out of orbit and this Earth would've dropped out of Vector Balance with the Cosmos, never to return. But it wasn't a failure. Far from it. Thank Zorn, I was equal to the task. . . Satellite Number One Magnetic flux in this quadrant is eight and holding. Magnetic flux eight and holding. . .
. . .
I have been a humble instrument of Great Powers. I could've taken this world apart and put it together. The greatest terrestrialman this world has seen since the great Avatars who also acted as agents, Shri Krishna Buddha, Moses, Christ and Mohammed. I am of their country. . . 'Come in Satellite Number One, Satellite Two, Satellite Three come in. . . ' But I'll slip away, no trace in the snow, no hand print in the dust and they'll continue delivering the morning paper as if nothing had happened, as if they hadn't lost a great Avatar. . . 'Come in all Satellites. Come in all Satellites. Come in. . . ' I could've been all-mighty and no-one would've smiled. But who knew? You don't know. How could you know?. . .
---Confesssions of a Primary Terrestrial Mental Receiver and Communicator: Num III Mark I

Prescriptions

2007-07-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

Good evening one and all, we're all so glad to see you here.
We'll play your favourite songs while you soak up the atmosphere.
We'll start with 'Old Man River'.
It may be stormy weather too.
I'm sure you'll know just what to do.
On with the show, good health to you!

--Jagger, Richards, On With the Show

So I entertained myself on Canada Day, the weather being blustery and unpredictable in T.O., by taking in Michael Moore's latest, Sicko. Fitting, since Canada's is one of the health care systems Moore holds up as exemplary by comparison with his own country. Recall thinking he was wise to go to London, Ontario to ask about waiting times. In Toronto we're still feeling the impact of Mike Harris's hospital closures, though I don't think people are actually dying at the rate of one every week or two anymore, as they desperately hunt up the nearest open facility--the system's managed at least a partial recovery from that mean-minded murderous assault. We've closed the worst of the bleeding holes. And I would suggest anyone inclined to think Moore's is the last word on the British health care system take a look at Lindsay Anderson's Brittania Hospital. But I agree with a point Moore's made about that in interviews--he isn't obliged to anatomize rival health care systems down to the bone, and he certainly isn't obliged to prove rival systems perfect, given how far from perfect the American system is, either compared to other systems or in its own proud isolation.

The section of the film that's proved most controversial comes at the end, when he seeks medical attention for three boatloads of HMO victims at Guantanamo Bay, and when he's refused there, chugs a little further onto the island of Cuba proper. What no reviewer's commented on that I've seen is that the decision to land in Cuba proper seems to have been improvised. Moore had made his point about Guantanamo Bay, and he surely must have known the result in advance. But using three boatloads of desperate people in a stunt and then dropping them off home must have seemed a little shabby. If that's how things happened it's a little less surprising he didn't feel the need to dot i's and cross t's about the less pleasant aspects of Castro's Cuba. As to whether Cuba, as has been speculated, was using this as a propaganda stunt, it's impossible to say--though they'd have to be swifter at improvisation than Moore, since he didn't phone ahead, and even official films complain that Cuban bureaucracy is plodding. (See Death of a Bureaucrat.) A number of reviewers with poor eyesight have even said the doctors seem selected for their Dr. McDreamy looks. TV star looks? Nah. No eyes blazing blue over scruffs of beard created by a special Hollywood razor. Healthy and handsome, yes. Posterboard material, no.

There's this to say on the question of whether Cuba treated (or at least now regards) this as a propaganda coup: who's to blame if they were able to use it that way? All the HMOs Moore indicts in this film had to do, to prevent this sort of propaganda against their system, was consistently provide honest and decent health care coverage at a fair rate, which systems all over the world manage to do without registering a loss.

The film confirms some of my reservations about Moore, but it's a reminder that his naif pose hides an incisive intelligence and corrosive wit--between films that sometimes dims in the memory. He can have his satirist's card back as far as I'm concerned, though the stunt buried in the last few minutes of the film suggests I should rather go on the attack. Moore discovered that a man who'd been keeping up an anti-Moore website over a number of years was about to close it down because his wife was ill and he couldn't cover her medical expenses. Moore sent an anonymous check to cover those expenses so the man didn't have to choose between saving his wife's life and keeping his attack site open. So perhaps I should write the most savage possible review and see if I can wangle an arts or journalism grant out of the Michael Moore Foundation.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Notions on Quotients

2007-07-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

Just recently there's been a controversy in the press over whether recent studies actually demonstrate a 3% difference in IQ on average between first-born and late- to last-born children. Plus speculations on the reason, if these studies are true, for the greater intelligence of first-borns. I suppose I should declare at the start that I'm a last-born, but my reasons for doubting whether IQ is a credible measure of intelligence don't really have much to do with my placement in the family pecking order. (Equally, my view is not confounded by the fact that the one time I was tested, in grade 3, I had the highest score in class. I'm still above average on Trivial Pursuit questions.)

The most damning anecdotal evidence against the IQ test I know of is Billie Holliday's score the one time she was tested--87. It can be argued whether Billie Holliday was a genius or only a near-genius, but in either case, if IQ numbers mean what's routinely claimed for them, this score is out by at least 50 points. It's lucky for the reputation of the IQ test that they were able to assign at random, instead of testing, the IQs of Goethe, Mozart and Da Vinci. And a three point difference in IQ signifies what?

CBC ran a nationally televised IQ test recently. I didn't participate, but I did do a question from the test that was quoted in Toronto Star (Weekend): "Which of these words is closest in meaning to conflict?" a) was contradiction, d) problem. b) and c) weren't close at all. The correct answer given confidently, just below, was contradiction. You see my conflict here? Sure you can argue for contradiction, but--such being the nature of partial synonyms with their irregular areas of overlap--you can arague just as cogently for problem. So I was being asked, in effect, which is the whole number closest in value to 4, and told the correct answer was 5, not 3. And I'd lose points in the test for guessing, incorrectly, 3. And a three point difference in IQ signifies what?

If you tied a Cheetah's hind legs together and sent it running, you'd be surprised how overrated its recorded speed was in comparison to its performance when tested. If you devise an intelligence test which excludes any measure of divergent thinking, your results will be similarly distorted--and there's no way to test for divergent intelligence that can possibly produce a numerical grade. And how well do the two functioning legs of a Cheetah perform if two are hobbled? Not very. It's not possible to improve skills at convergent thinking by ignoring divergent thought--concentrating on correct answers to the exclusion of wide-ranging questions--because the quality of the answers we discover is intimately bound to the scope and free-ranging sweep of the questions we ask.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

A Microbe Speaks

2007-06-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

{Two 'test passages' from a projected novella I'm thinking of getting back to work on called Hello, This is Your Virus. The speaker is a microbiotic specimen that has been gifted with long life and articulate intelligence. Won't go into the specifics, might keep 'em just a little shady in the story itself, but keep in mind the voice in the following is that of a loquacious viral infection}

{This passage will link to a description of the organism's 'birth' as a conscious entity, in the bloodstream of a soldier in the great war. The argument connecting disease and war as natural phenomena will be considerably extended}

The influenza outbreak that followed (partly overlapping) the end of the First World War caused more deaths than every other battle of the war. Which suggests that if you were a miltary commander seeking true bang for your buck, you'd hire germs instead of people to fight your wars. Certainly they're a whole lot less demanding when it comes to wages and medical benefits. The only real disadvantage is that your true epidemic never knows when to quit. Try showing a deadly bacterial strain two rival armies sometime, and see how well it distinguishes friend from foe. If you lay much emphasis on the distinction yourself, the result is bound to disappoint.

The military efficiency of the 1918 epidemic is surprising in one sense: your average influenza strain is dumb as two posts, and this particular variety was dangerously inbred. It could lead you to wonder if military success is a function of intelligence at all.

{The virus's opinion of smart bombs}

Some of the terms you use puzzle me. There are whole nations whose bloodstreams my progeny are entirely ignorant of, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how suicide bombers are viewed in the parts of the world where they proliferate: I gather more admiringly than they are hereabouts. You tend to regard them as cowardly, which makes no sense according to any definition of the word I've ever come across--and the definitions you carry in your blood are truer than the ones you put on paper--or as mad, and that seems a good deal more plausible. Then you turn around and describe a bomb that acts exactly like a suicide bomber as smart: where's the logic in that? I have no idea what the quality of life is of your average bomb: maybe they're in a state of permanent depression or diffused impotent rage. But if these bombs were really smart, wouldn't they refuse to explode?

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Speak for Yourself

2007-06-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

Drifter: I thought I was among civilized men.
Dobbs: Who are you calling uncivilized? (Flattens drifter with a punch.)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Now Magazine has been running ads for some time reading Free. (Caption over one picture) Speech. (Caption over the next one in sequence). The most archetypal of these (and if memory serves, the one most often deployed) shows a pretty Asian-Canadian girl, demurely posed in the first photo. In the second she's in attack stance, her facial expression half between a jeer and a snarl, giving every Now reader (or city passerby in the case of hoarding and mini-billboard ads scattered about our fair city) the finger.

I won't deny this is an admirably direct example of truth in advertising--and Now readers quite an impressively masochistic bunch. But it's curious--there are dissenters among them, but I'm sure the majority opinion of Now editors is in favour of Canada's new hate speech laws.

I'm certainly not going to bring them up on charges of expressing hatred and contempt, not only for their own readership, but for Toronto's drivers, bikers and walkers en bloc. I think the hate speech law has as much coherence as the obscenity statutes. It might not be clear who is guilty of murder, fraud or embezzlement when these are alleged, but there's a reasonably solid understanding what acts consitute commission of these crimes. There may be questions of interpretation in a given case--was this a murder or an act of self-defence? is this embezzlement or a legitimate ATM fee? But it can be said with reasonable definiteness what would qualify as an instance of most genuinely criminal acts. There is nothing resembling universal agreement on either hate speech or obscenity. To call a snuff film or a child porn movie obscene is to trivialize the gravity of its offence. The relevant charges in these cases are murder, rape and child molestation. To call a murder a hate crime seems tautological, though twisted love is almost as often the motive. But if hate is an aggravation of the crime of murder, wouldn't the indifference of a professional hit man be an extenuating circumstance? But as for saying "I'd love to kill that little motherfucker"--which might run afoul of both hate speech and obscenity legislation--I doubt there's an instance in ten thousand where a remark like that is a legitimate threat or prophecy, or anything much more than blowing off steam. The courts are clogged enough already.

Not every threat to free speech is external; the most persistent ones in any of our lives tend to be internal. If you define free speech as free-floating omnidirectional anger, what's any censor in the world going to do to you that you haven't already done to yourself? In that mood it's impossible to think straight or speak coherently. Good luck contributing to the wider debate either locally or globally if you can't do that.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

C,S,M

2007-06-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky said in an interview once that the style of his polemics is, as numerous critics contend, turgid--because in order to get a hearing, he has to check and double-check his facts and footnote them meticulously--his critics are able to ignore facts at will, because they're writing from an accepted consensus view, and that leaves more latitude for spriteliness of style.

This is too harsh a self-judgment. Actually Chomsky's a far better than average stylist. Certainly he's a far more than averagely concise writer, though I recollect the opposite being alleged by a newspaper columnist once. It's an odd complaint to come from that quarter--I can count on the fingers of one hand the newspaper columnists I've read who are not tediously verbose, and this columnist was by no means one of those fingers. Even odder was the sentence he quoted to demonstrate this fault. It was a remark made in an interview, and few of us are as concise in speech as in writing, but I tried three times, and failed, to rework the sentence so that it said all that Chomsky had said, in fewer words. I wonder what the columnist thought concise actually meant?

There is one serious weakness in Chomsky's style, which he's acknowledged, but only by projection. A couple of times I recollect him saying that some recent move in the giddy whirl of power politics with its casual exterminations and cynical justifications "would have been too much even for the irony of Swift." They're certainly too much for Chomsky in one respect; he's able to apprehend these killing ironies comprehensively enough, and detail them. But he's certainly not able to make his indignation stand out unforgettably through persistent savaging wit, nor to sum up an enormity in one sharp sudden epiphet that pops the vanity of its perps. This is a weakness Swift conspicuously lacked.

(A weakness he lacked; I seriously need a coffee; ah well, let it stand.)

Swift said of the one Lord Lieutenant of Ireland he personally esteemed: "No one ever ruined a nation with greater reluctance." He could drop into a paragraph, as a throwaway line, the rhetorical question: "Is this an age of Man to consider a crime improbable merely because it is great?" With that gift for slashing wit he combined as meticulous a habit of checking, re-checking, cross-checking, double-, triple- and quadruple-checking his facts as any journalist or historian could ever boast, though he never did himself--simply regarded it as the bare minimum of integrity serious writing required.

Michael Moore, in relation to Swift, has roughly the opposite balance of weaknesses and strengths. While I'd certainly never accuse him of Swftian irony at the top of his form, he's able to give a vivid comic shape to his indignation. What he conspicuously lacks is Swift's passion to attack as vigorously and directly as occasion warrants, but never at the cost of fuzzy thinking or avoidable misrepresentation.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Just So We're Clear

2007-06-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

I've read just enough of Salman Rushdie's work to know there are things I like about it and things I don't. I've promised myself I'll tackle Midnight's Children, which I'm told is his best, someday, but I'll leave debate on the merits or otherwise of The Satanic Verses to anyone who's actually been able to finish reading it. (Which would not, I suspect, include most of its Islamist critics, who like the fundamentalists that despise Life of Brian rely exclusively on divine revelation. It's popularly supposed that God, or Allah if you prefer, has read and seen everything.)

But yo! clerics: could you chill just a little? Comedians kill, reviewers don't, and even comedians don't usually kill literally. When they do it's rarely job related.

I know Harold Pinter's ouevre fairly well. Solid enough body of work--shame he gave up writing in 1975. Who knows what he might have produced in his later years if he'd kept at it. I thought a Nobel for Pinter was ridiculous and deplorable when to the best of my knowledge Peter Barnes and Dennis Potter were never nominated, and for a dead cert never R.A. Lafferty. Alasdair Gray? he's still alive, so there's time to rectify the omission in his case. But Nobel Committee! This is a man in his 70s in a country where the life expectancy of males is somewhere around the mid 50s. Time's a-wasting!

But let me make this perfectly clear: I do not think suicide bombing would be a reasonable response to the extreme and tactless provocation of honouring an inferior writer with such a prize while ignoring so many others who are manifestly his superiors. I think a few symbolic shots, fired from a tower, not aimed to hit anyone, into Oslo's main square would be quite enough. In all things I favour moderation.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

Rasoir Barbe du Jour Miroir Trop Intime

2007-06-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

{from HOW I FOUND EUROPE}

Shaving methodically each day, leaving accidental patches of beard which vary with the irregularity of the light. Then at a friend's house in Lille he is confronted by a make-up mirror, attached to the wall on an accordion stand, which displays to an uncomfortable degree his bristles. Reversed, the image magnifies, showing every hair disconcertingly black, nestling in its pore. It makes for a formidably close shave, even with a dull blade, since the mirror obliges him to cover the ground more than once before it'll show a smooth reflection. The view it gives of flesh contours is terrifyingly close up and personal. A bubble of blood beneath his nose, another when he whisks the hair off his chinny-chin-chin, resemble gashes across the chests of startled hussars in battle scenes lately viewed at the Louvre.

C 2005, 2007 Martin Heavisides

A Different Kidney

2007-06-13T17:39:00.000-07:00

From an article by Matt Hartley (Globe and Mail, June 13 '07) concerning people seeking kidney donors online:

"Hugo Rousseau, 63, was diagnosed with progressive renal kidney failure almost two years ago and has been waiting for a transplant ever since.
. . .
He is now trying to get approval for two potential Canadian donors he met through the website.
'Why not use a stranger?' he says. 'If I get a kidney from my brother-in-law, and he breaks his leg or loses his job four years from now, the first thing he's going to do is come looking to me for help.' "

I can certainly see where it would be a nuisance having somebody come pester you for help only because he'd donated a kidney to you and kept you alive, but I have to wonder how M. Rousseau imagines he'll be able to negotiate the acceptance of a kidney from someone, go through a lengthy and intimate operating procedure, and have the donor still remain a stranger. Or does he just figure it would be easier to tell somebody in his hour of need, 'Buzz off--so you saved my life, who cares?' if that person weren't family?

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

The Last Time I Saw Paris

2007-06-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

A word or two more on Lynn Crosbie's column pluralizing pity(Globe and Mail, June 11 '07), which I quoted from yesterday. The grand conclusion of this think piece on the media piranha feeding on Paris Hilton's prison sentence? Lynn doesn't know if Paris Hilton is a bad person, but she does know her reader is, if (s)he takes any pleasure in Paris Hilton's pain. Excuse me? If one bad action is a final proof, how can Lynn Crosbie claim not to know whether Paris Hilton is a bad person? She describes her as serially taking pleasure not simply in the pain of others, but in pain it's been her pleasure and privilege personally to inflict. That's rather worse than what Lynn accuses her hypothetical reader of doing. But Lynn surely knows that if one bad action makes a bad person, she and I and everyone we know are terrible people, well deserving the crackling eternal roastie flames of Hell. Because all of us act badly often.

I bear Paris Hilton no particular ill will, but she more than earned the jail time she's serving, unlike the people doing five and ten year stretches in Texas for shoplifting. I can sympathize with her fear that paparazzi might somehow snap candids of her peeing, but somebody shuffled into place on an assembly line scaffold in Iraq after a twenty minute trial, staring at the knotted noose the nice American major at the prosecutor's table was so good as to insist on, has loads more to worry about. And if Paris keeps on talking herself up as the heroine of her own soap opera, but vocalizing and carrying on like its principal villain, she'll earn more and worse. To my mind Paris is too young for any coherent judgment to be passed, whether she's a good or bad person--but she's long overdue to make a good start.

C 2007 Martin Heavisides

What Were They Thinking?

2007-06-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Is mechanical proofreading or authorial ineptitude principally responsible? You be the judge.

"In the role as villains, Tekatch's Mayella Ewell is a seething cauldron of tortured venom, while Wayne Best definitely limns her father Bob's cretinist penchant for violence." (Michael Posner, Globe and Mail, June 1 '07, review of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Okay, anybody, best guess: possible meaning? Likeliest hallucinogen involved in composition of sentence?

"If plots were people, this obese thing would be cuing up for liposuction." (Rick Groen, June 1 '07, review of Mrs. Brooks.) Have they started using pool tables instead of operating tables when performing liposuction now? Bad idea, IMHO. Even worse if they're using pool cues instead of scalpels.

"And wags, the pampered wives and girlfriends spending their partner's cash, take their places after a sterling performance accompanying the England football team at the 2006 World Cup." (Agence France Presse.) In this case I suspect inept translation had muddied the meaning of a sentence that in French was reasonably clear. A similar translation back into French (a Frenching of this Englished version as it were) might turn un peu surreal.

"The star appears always to have known that pity, in addition to stars, are blind." (Lynn Crobie, Globe and Mail, June 11 '07.) Are pity blind? Is our children learning?

C 2007 Martin Heavisides