On the cover of the poesy tome! Blurb plus!!

Yes, Virginia, there IS a book of poetry and poetry-criticism (mostly the latter) blurping like bitumen though the constricted pipelines of my brain, blurping, blorping toward publication. As I have joked elsewhere, a guaranteed worst-seller! Anyway, here's the back-cover blurp... er, blurb, unless the publisher thinks of something better:

Questions, questions, questions...

So does Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” actually MEAN anything? What about Jonathan Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift”? Why are the profligate professors flapping all over the map about THAT poem? And how does it happen that after four centuries the same damn professors STILL don’t have a clue about Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”? Okay, admittedly a clue or four about this part of the poem, or that little bit. But no general idea whatsoever about the poem as a whole. Nothing at all. Nada. Zilch. When will our theory-infested, jargon-ridden Blithering Class muster the brainpower to decipher it? Never? Or maybe when they read this brilliant book? Again, what’s the deal with all those ultra-weird Bob Dylan songs on the Basement Tapes?  Uh, let me guess, did Bobby plagiarize those hillbilly-flavored goofs from somewhere? What?—from Shakespeare?? Are you joshing me? Hillbilly Shakespeare??? Wait a minute, how much Shakespeare is in this book anyway? Quite a lot? Maybe 30% or more? Shakespeare... wow... seriously boring.  Worse than frigging high school! What?—and this book has some of Andersen’s own poetry too? There's poetry wafting in from nasty, redneck, tar-tarnished ALBERTA? From a cabbie??! LMFAO! C’mon, admit it, this is a really, really boring book, right? Total snooze-button, right?

Tedious answers inside!

     *     *     *

Ah yes, have some fairly definite ideas about the front-cover too, but your alleged critic will be coy about THAT. Hey, it'll be a bit cartoonish, with a teensy pic of John Lennon in one corner, saying, "...and for those of you who want to know why Old Flat-Top has feet down below his knees, that'll be answered inside too..."

Heh.  =]

On bewailing the "public intellectual" shortage

Most days it is hard to flip open the laptop, even to merely slap together a tweet.
    Age. Cynicism. The daily drudgery of existence. The futility of launching another fart into the sulfurous hurricane of the internet.
    But fetching the morning papers today, presto!--here we have the National Post with "Culture Wars: Where have all the public intellectuals gone?" p.1 on the mast-bottom. An arrow to my heart!--although not exactly an untackled question. Moreover, don't we already have a few public intellectuals in Canada? Jonathan Kay, Colby Cosh and Dan Gardner spring immediately to mind, and there are others, although you may object that most are too tainted with journalism and reality to qualify as genuine beard-stroking thunkers. Worse, you could argue that despite their mediapodia, they don't have a great deal of of traction in the Canadian mind. And whatever happened to Mark Kingwell? Did our ivory-tower eminence get tired of mud-wrestling in the journals of lower learning? How grubby is this public-intellectual thing anyway? What exactly is involved in the mainstream-media cleanup after our crappy educational system has dumped its load?
    As it turns out the Post article is Yankee-sourced, concerning a new documentary film Best of Enemies, centred on the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley on ABC during the August 1968 Republican Convention (heavy topic the Vietnam war of course). Total buzz-kill for this blogger, instantly suggesting two hotheads: Vidal calling Buckley a Nazi, Buckley snapping back "you faggot" at Vidal amid otherwise over-familiar and inconclusive platitudes.
    Or is this just a media-distortion now filtered through my lousy memory? (Fact-check: it was actually "crypto-Nazi" and "goddamn queer"--an exchange now captured online like pretty much every other sorry fragment of intellectual history).
    But the National Post story, Calum Marsh's "When the culture wars were worth fighting" mentions this hot exchange not at all, perhaps as being unseemly for Public Intellectuals of the Golden Age--his theme and the film's appearing to be our society's supposed loss of high-level punditry nowadays. He does note that "the network (ABC) didn't anticipate the vigour of their chosen conversationalists," alleging that "millions were held rapt by Vidal and Buckley's nearly half-dozen debates."
    Actually, I suspect that if Nielsen had been monitoring the audience closely, it would have found hundreds of thousands were actually reaching for beer and/or snacks during the more tedious parts, and significant numbers missed the minute-long Nazi/queer exchange during a bathroom break. Certainly it is notable, perhaps astonishing that in an article on Big Thunkers wading through five debates, Mr. Marsh fails to dredge up a single witty quip (or any other kind) by either Vidal or Buckley, nor does he even give much of a summary of the duo's ideas (dully left-right, i.e. painfully ideological, truth be known).
    If you check back to the YouTube clip, you will find, embedded in the name-calling, Vidal positing Europe's sympathy to the legitimate aspirations of the Viet Cong for national unity, and Buckley tut-tutting the temerity of the Cong in daring to shoot at U.S. Marines, but whether these two banalities are better, worse or typical of the general debate is left for us to guess (I'll conjecture no better). Or perhaps Marsh just wants to avoid any spoilers for the HotDoc a-coming.
   In any case, it is hard to muster any enthusiasm for Marsh's and the film's manufactured discrepancy between today's cheap pundits and the "literary pedigree" bred into the "iconic" Buckleyesque-Vidaloid intellectuals of yesteryear. Buckley I managed to plow through in depth eons ago, yielding a deep-seated dislike for the man. Like Vidal he oozes that erudite mid-Atlantic accent, but his ideas are a threadworn patchwork of mean-spirited sophistry. Vidal I know less well, but on the basis of his introduction to The Impossible Mencken I'd venture that while he might be a seven-foot intellectual giant, he falls well short of America's ten-foot colossus. The Sage of Baltimore is a fine measuring-stick for public intellectuals of any era, and both heirs to his artillery would have benefited from reading his essay "On Controversy."
    Finally, keep in mind that the Buckley vs Vidal confrontation was television, mere impromptu cut-and-thrust. I close my eyes and imagine two bespectacled junior-high achievers, suddenly facing off in the schoolyard while surprised students gather round, shouting, "Nerd fight! Nerd fight!"
    Durable works of the intellect are produced by more leisurely contemplation, and committed to the printed page. Buckley and Vidal may seem like ancient history now, but 1968's two perishable eggheads have also been left in the dust-up, quite remote from the Socrates and Aristotle of The School of Athens.
    As the Bible says: "Ask not why it is that former days were better than these--for it is not from wisdom that you ask this."

It's really about... Mencken? Utah???

Got a dozen writing projects at CRUNCH TIME (or past) so what do I do? Answer the National Post's call for 100-word or less suggestions to solve the problem of Iran's nukes.
    Hey, I'm a professional thunker, a professional digressor and a professional oddball too. So really, why isn't Obama dragooning me to be Secretary of State? Eh?
    Note that the following version comprises the FULL letter--the Post trimmed a few items from it when they printed it today, like "funky farmer-ambience" and "Sunni Arabia"--possibly to make me look like a normal human being. Nice try, guys!

In 1938, immediately after Kristallnacht the notorious American anti-semite H. L. Mencken demanded that the U.S. government quickly accept German-Jewish refugees (it didn't) and suggested western Canada could take thousands too, where they'd improve the funky farmer-ambience. The solution to Iran's nuclear schemes today is the same: evacuate Israel (incl. any gay/straight Arabs who wish to tag along) and transplant them in Utah, partitioning it to create a 51st state. Then blow Iran a goodbye-kiss with two or three tactical nukes into their facilities, lest they get Plan B ideas about Sunni Arabia. Problem solved. Easy as borscht.

      *       *       *That's it. Lets slip this one into my writing dossier and see if anyone will now hire the Western Wacko...

"Is he crazy?"--a covert answer, and close but no cigar

    Clawing through the high stack of current newspapers, I randomly pull a September 14 Edmonton Sun--and accidentally stumble on a feature by Michael Platt of the Calgary Sun, headlined:

UNBEARABLE TRUTH COST FRANKLIN
PIONEER PROPER RECOGNITION

The editor in me cringes at the awkwardness of the double-stack (especially the split "Franklin pioneer" which is somewhat vague to begin with), but the story it tells (yes, online too) is a fascinating tale of dullards thinking inside the rut, until after a century and a half a sharp mind o'erleaps the mucky track and rolls to proper conclusions. I would headline it:

BRITAIN FINALLY RECOGNIZES RAE,
MALIGNED ARCTIC EXPLORER

John Rae in fact was the seaman who in 1854 discovered some remains of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, including evidence of cannibalism among the desperate Franklin crew before they perished; and also the final link of the Northwest Passage, the Rae Channel, which Amundsen used (with full credit to Rae) in his pioneering voyage through the Passage in 1903-4.
    All of which is interesting in itself, as are the literary heroics of Ken McGoogan in telling the whole tangled tale in a number of books (he also spoke at the laying of a ledger-stone to Rae in Westminster Abbey).
   But for me the punchline is the 150-year delay in recognition--a classic case of shoot-the-messenger. Because Rae had concluded and reported cannibalism, he was rendered persona non grata and shunned. No one likes to hear horrific things (unless the horror is safely contained in Hollywood claptrap).
    This verity strikes close to home, as it may help explain a curious puzzle in my Bob Dylan research. If, as I concluded in my investigation into Dylan's wholesale expropriation of Shakespeare for the Basement Tapes, Dylan has effectively solved the "Hamlet problem" which has dogged scholars for centuries, why did he plant the solution with extreme obscurity in his song "Crash on the Levee"? (aka "Down in the Flood"). Couldn't he just have, um, written a letter to the editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly or something?
    In theory, he could have. Except that would be obtuse and boring. And Dylan is dealing with (and is probably fully aware that he is dealing with) a double-horror: first, the appalling news that Prince Hamlet is not a tragic hero but a vicious schmuck, a prince who is not just "melancholy mad" (with the emphasis on the melancholy, please) but actually crazy. It is a helluva jolt when one discovers this, and it is notable that almost all the scholars pussy-footing around the fact--and there have been quite a few--tend to avoid the conclusion or gloss over the evidence supporting it--wherein the second horror, that our critic-psychologists "who prophesize with the pen" have been routinely diagnosing Lord Lunatic as merely... stressed-out? For 400+ years. Has our western brain-trust really been so dense and derelict for all these centuries??
    With the exception of a handful of critics, yes. And even these few approach and circle the question most gingerly, never quite uttering the unthinkable. Perhaps the most notable of these hesitants is T. S. Eliot, who wrote a famous-in-academe essay on Hamlet (my most recent rediscovery of it came in a criticism textbook) wherein he lists the numerous ways in which the play Just. Doesn't. Add. Up.
    Included is the perennial question of "what's bugging the Prince of Denmark?" (if you have the time and a weird sense of humor, check every scholarly explanation of why Hamlet kills Polonius, sight unseen). At the end of the essay Eliot tosses up his hands, supposing it is just Shakespeare being his usual sui generis self, breaking all the rules for tragedy, God knows why. But still basically composing a tragedy. Go figure.
    To give a modicum of credit, Eliot clearly had good intuitive suspicions, even if they never found footing. My own literary lion, H. L. Mencken also had a few stray remarks about Hamlet, if not an entire essay; in one of them he flatly calls Prince Hamlet a "sophomore" which may be the lowest estimation of Hammie's character I've ever encountered. Clearly he had suspicions too. Maybe the two had even read Voltaire, who entertained some of the earliest and most extensive hunches about Hamlet not being quite on the level. (In his memoir My Life As Author and Editor, Mencken describes a casual meeting with Eliot where the two discussed the technicalities of their respective magazines; we can only speculate what they might have accomplished if they had butted heads about Hamlet instead).
    In any case it is easy to imagine Bob Dylan sitting dismayed at his ugly discovery and mulling how to handle it (he mentions the Hamlet-problem glancingly in his book Tarantula) until finally deciding to deflect the rotten Dane into another of his opaque cryptogram-songs.
    Yep, who needs the headache of sorting out the details of Shakespeare's closet-satire, and answering the yowls of the dull academics?-- leave THAT noise to posterity. Most astute.
    And in another century or so Will and Bob, those two sly speakers of the unspeakable, may get rehabilitated enough to get ledger-stones in Westminster Abbey too.

    PS: The title of this post comes from an very sharp English professor, who asked "Is he crazy?" as the very first comment on teaching the play to us. She asked the question as intently as if it really mattered, and it does.

Ask Bob: Is there something to "Nothing to It"?

The little critic-inside-the-critic sneers and taunts me:
    "So, how is the big Bob Dylan project going?"
    "Lousy. Beyond rotten. Don't ask."
    So my little critic just sits there, head tilted, with a patient smirk, expectant and waiting. Her usual pose. Me, I'm off to the English Language & Usage/ Stack Exchange, a newly discovered website where it is possible to waste hours and days exploring the nooks and crannies of the lingo we speak, earning points, badges and other rewards while possibly improving the expression of it. For merely knowing the word "moocher" indeed, I have piled up points and badges galore. Gotta love success, even the somewhat nebulous cyber-Pavlovian kind.
    But in the back of my distracted mind remains that inner critic and the Dylan-problem. Part of me says just ditch it. Abandon the intractable knot. Bequeath the headache to the grandchildren...
    My cute inner critic, however, readily pops by and starts asking pointed questions. "So, a quitter, eh?
    Well, not quite. While waiting for some sort of brainstorm on publishing my heap of Dylan-research I can still add to it. And the Basement Tapes lyric-trove, happily, has expanded with a whole album of new songs released in late 2014 with lyrics written by Dylan during the 1967 Basement Tapes period, and performed by Elvis Costello &Co. Are they too Shakespeare-based? Seems so, here's Macbeth, signifying "Nothing to It" (and that IS a dagger you see before you at about 1:47 of the video which is also the video-illo as you first encounter it on YouTube; cute, Bob, very cute). "Married to my Hack" clearly derives from All Is True aka Henry VIII. Already mentioned these two roots in detail on Twitter to dead silence and, I'm guessing, utter incomprehension. Initial indications too are that "When I Get My Hands on You" is derived from all the detached hands in the revenge-saturated Titus Andronicus--although maybe I'll let someone else do all the word-by-word, concept-by-concept, pun-by-pun analysis for me. Getting sort of weary of it.

A perky new motto for the former City of Champions

The vexatious question is officially back--a City of Edmonton councillor having plunked the issue onto the Council agenda once more: what should the city's slogan be?

    Earlier bouts of our slogan-disease didn't go over well, inevitably returning to the dismal fact that our Great Sports Heritage, which circa 1980 sprouted the "City of Champions" boast, and eventually signs re-boasting the slogan at the city's seven gates, had now passed into the custody of teams, especially the Oilers, that majorly sucked. What to do?

   So the brows around town gnawed at the dilemma. To no end, unless you count snarkfests as accomplishments. Some of the suggestions put forth as replacement-slogans, indeed were masterpieces of satire or basic bile...

Okay, let's put on those rose-colored gasses

Having some fun with Idealists & Co.

    Okay, let's put on those rose-colored glasses!

It is most pleasing when several of the ideas bouncing around my brain converge on one spot. Doesn't happen often enough, in fact, but this morning I grab a newspaper from atop one of those heaps that should have been tossed into the blue-bag long, long ago.
    It is the Feb 2, 2013 Globe and Mail, and the headline is "HAVE WOMEN SOLVED 'THE PROBLEM WITH NO NAME'? THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AT 50"
    Perhaps it is justthe incurable smartass in me, but I almost automatically think, what if men solved the problem in 1986, and the women just didn't notice?

We're Gonna Whip Your Ass! (the great Canadian reality show)

Alternate title or subtitle of the show: Who Wants to be a Solomonaire?
    Like many of my better ideas (should I put irony-quotes around the "better"?) this one comes to me as I emerge from deep sleep and the grotesque empire of dreams. I forget most of the details of this dream--my dreams tend to disappear on waking, no matter how hard I try to remember them) on this occasion one item remains in my consciousness: my undergoing a particularly curious and horrific type of torture (at whose hands I have no idea) and the simultaneous panicky thought that I should NEVER tell anyone what this torture method is, lest some clever sadist out there might see it and use it.
   The rest of the dream evaporates as my waking thoughts assemble, but the analytic thought then occurs that this weird dream is some sort of wacky offshoot of a large buffet supper and the last bit of reading I did before bedtime, a quick, superficial glance at a profile of Jason Kenney in the latest issue of Walrus magazine (cover-headline: "And you think Harper is right wing: The ascent of Jason Kenney")
   Amid all this, the daily domestic agenda comes pelting in (jeez, how long since I've watered the plants...) intermixed with an almost automatic elaboration (not sure what else to call it) of a Walrus call-out (large-type thing) that the magazine's layout crew used to relieve the long grey story--a call-out restating, "Still Kenney's balancing act has come at a cost: increasingly, this country has seen its international image tarred with a mean streak."--into some extrapolations of the whole tough-on-crime tenet (over which the article vigorously wrings its semantic hands) into some thoughts about how the dramatic structure of civil and criminal trials might be improved by turning a few of them into reality shows. Details of how this would work, e.g.lawyers showboating extravagently, and the vast audience voting on the verdict and sentence, cascade into my brain remarkably fast.
    But also another panicky thought intrudes, that I won't get the details threshed out in the hour or so before the dog must be walked, or I'll get sidelined on social-media as I too often do ...

Judge Judy...

...todays G&Mail India election p.1 too...
 

The future of the lingo (unto and through a bad review)

There's nothing like the juxtaposition of a pair of news items to get a train of thought clacking along. Going through a stack of 2009 newspapers (don't ask) and the weekend (March 15) Globe and Mail, for instance yields an unlikely symbiosis...


Will I ever get time enough or organized enough to finish any of these larval posts? Stay t... hey, where are you going? Come back!!