Where is the last ditch? (or what is a metaphor for?)

    Some thoughts on the rhetoric of journalists (alternately lurid, trite, hackneyed, rich in solecisms...) with a truckload of examples to embarrass everyone and ensure that I never work in this town again...

Oh hey, here's a fresh and fairly good one from the October Mother Jones: "a continuous series of pipelines and processing plants that line the Mississippi as it twists like a busted-up slinky toward the gulf"(48, although I think both Slinky and Gulf should be capitalized)...

Ah, were but all journalist so dexterous with their words!

As I return to this germ of an essay after

Tailoring Canada's national anthem to various cranks and agendas

Picking up the August edition of our community paper Rat Creek Press, I notice a quarter-page advertisement from my MP Peter Goldring with the somewhat awkward heading, "O CANADA 'IN ALL THY SONS COMMAND'"  and arguing in nine paragraphs that: "The current anthem is politically correct and is gender neutral."
    Wow, good to see that all the bases are covered, Mr. G! But, as many a furious controversy over the national anthem has raged north of the 49th Parallel, even to violent barfights, mayhem and editorials (note to Americans: joking here) it may be worthwhile to address the burning question of the anthem's social adequacy in that cool, rational and faintly neurotic way that typifies the True North.
    Mayhaps it is even more worthwhile to address it in a ribald and iconoclastic way. I mean, this isn't the Excited States, where people get lynched for not saluting the flag. We DO get a bit choked-up about the anthem, but not to that degree...

The proper Shakespearean Hokey-Pokey

One never knows what strange brain-spasms may come when one awakes (the Dylan-Shakespeare thing, you might recall, began with a groggy, waking earworm of Dylan's "Crash on the Levee" rattling through my old brain) and this morning was no exception--just a random fact-recall: that someone had done a parody of the children's song-dance the Hokey-Pokey, in ponderous Shakespearean diction--of course a far, iambic-pentameter cry from the simple bouncing doggerel of the original.
    I also recalled that while the parody had considerable charm and humor, it rather overdid the heightened-language mannerisms and other buffooneries, and could probably be improved. After giving the dog her scheduled pain-killer, I whipped out a sheet of paper and over breakfast cereal my brain delighted me by quickly cranking out--
     
       Thine left foot, thrust thou outwardly,
       Thine left foot then draw in,
       Thine left foot, once again, outwardly,
       O thine foot dost thou launch into full-spirited agitation,
       Enact the dance called Hokey-Pokey, thus,
       Turn thy body round, and this compriseth sum and approbation. (etc.)

Um, okay, now to prove I haven't totally lost my Elgin Marbles...

PS: Yep, a little of the eternal revisionism the next day (jeez, actually forgot the original lyrics, which can vary a bit: http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-hokey-pokey-lyrics-brave-combo.html ).
    Polish, polish... ah, the ridiculous ways I avoid that damn Dylan article. Oh yes, here be the swings and errors of the original parody: http://www.phantomranch.net/folkdanc/articles/hokeypokey.htm
     

Did I solve the mystery of "Nottamun Town" in 1998? Or...?

I was pretty sure of my solution to the enigmatic song while struggling through my second Fiction Writing class. Then came the internet, and I stumbled on the Wikipedia entry...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nottamun_Town


*usual starter-kit* (may contain a tangential note on the evolution of "Lydia Pink" to "Lily the Pink" too....)

1,001 afterthoughts on Bob Dylan's cute references

Yes, it will be impossible to get ALL the cuteness into the Dylan/Shakespeare article, so this is the spot for the overflow (e.g. what the heck Dylan's "Scarlet Town" is all about. Hint: when Dylan sings "The streets have names that you can't pronounce"--one of them is possibly 4th Street). And a few reactions to reader concerns and/or snoring.
    "Scarlet Town," by the way, may be a number of things, including a highly-coded (i.e. referential) treatise on the art of referential poem-composition...

Hey, hey, it's Noam Chomsky! (and perkier stuff)

The illusion persists that intellectuals are able to choose their own paths of thought, and select their own fields of battle, but this is no more true for us professional thunkers than it is for other cops. At least 90% of our time is spent dealing with other thunkers and/or perceived malefactors who pounce upon the polity. And circumscribing their thunking is, with brutal and often tedious inevitability, what constitutes our never-ending patrol work.
    Cruising through Edmonton's Fringe Festival last week (the second-largest in the world after Edinburgh!) a gang of us over-educated folks stopped by the Wee Book Inn to browse...

Walking the dog. Just walking the dog

Taking our German Shepoid out for a morning walk is my normal start to the day, and although strenuous (she is three years old and prone to bursts of energy; I'm 60 and not) the routine is refreshing and invigorating, even something of a Zen exercise in getting attuned to one's environs.
    We live in Edmonton's inner city, so the jaunt is funkier than it would be in the suburbs (a new neighborhood pops up every week on Edmonton's outskirts--thank you, bustling fossil-fuel economy!) and one is almost guaranteed to see a hooker and a bottle-picker or two before arriving back home...

outlawed harebells, don't-give-a-crap yards

pseudo-joists, drawer w dado joints!

surprise cat-lunge

It's historic, apparently. And roughly democratic.

http://boingboing.net/2013/08/10/lavabit-founder-has-stopped-us.html

Episode One: What Democracy? (That's what I've been asking!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbLslkIR2k&feature=youtu.be … @GreenLiberation

So, is Shakespeare an anti-semite or what?

This essay was sparked by a Friday letter to National Post by a theatre professor, uttering the oddest assertion--that Shakespeare bestows no mercy upon Shylock in Merchant of Venice. But also Margaret Atwood's supremely hesitant fudging on the subject in her Payback lectures. And a book-reviewer in the Globe and Mail a few years back who called Shakespeare an "extreme anti-semite" if memory serves--this despite the fact that it was in the Globe and Mail back in the 80s that I read my first thoroughly-reasoned defense of the Merchant of Venice as being not anti-semitic. But really, who does research before filibustering nowadays?
    So, was Shakespeare anti-semitic? And is Merchant of Venice Exhibit A of the evidence?
    You would think that after 400+ years all this would be a settled question. Nope. You'd be surprised how little has actually been settled regarding any aspect of the Bard, despite ample time for scholarly tie-downs. A joke I overheard in academe nicely summarizes the situation: "All Shakespeare plays are now problem-plays."
    Perhaps the joke is a puzzler to anyone with the usual smattering of high-school Shakespeare. What the joke riffs upon is the professorial invention and maintenance of a group of Shakespeare plays that don't seem to follow the dramatic rules--Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and a few others--but whose strange qualities are perhaps more in the eye of the beholder than within the plays themselves. The professors themselves argue about which plays to categorize as problematic, and a few rebels in the prof-gang even denounce the problem-designation as fuzzy, useless and overdue for a trashing
    So. Let's grab Merchant of Venice with our heavy-duty tongs and have some fun with racism versus anti-racism, possibly the most idiotic dialectic on the planet...

(another mere starter; stay tuned)