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!!
Monday, March 17, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
Fleeting thoughts on war, guilt, groupthink and "coming to terms with"
Having actually managed to get up at 4 a.m. I can enjoy a leisurely breakfast, made enjoyable, I hope by finally getting to read Saturday's National Post, only two days late.
As an addicted newspaper reader (three subscriptions) I should know better--reading the news just entangless you hopelessly and uselessly in world affairs--reaally, what damned bit of difference would one more drop of commentary in the vast ocean of punditry make?--while personal jobs from taxi-driving to house-renos lag. This day is no different: reams of stuff about the start of Winter Olympics (from wireless-safety to Putin's prospects), another molestation charge against Woody Allen, Conrad Black harumphing about the economic non-recovery, Robert Fulford contemplating Japan and its recurring Yasukuni furore...
But the first thing that really grabs me is a letter to the editor about Mackenzie King's racism...
yet, yet another ongoing...
As an addicted newspaper reader (three subscriptions) I should know better--reading the news just entangless you hopelessly and uselessly in world affairs--reaally, what damned bit of difference would one more drop of commentary in the vast ocean of punditry make?--while personal jobs from taxi-driving to house-renos lag. This day is no different: reams of stuff about the start of Winter Olympics (from wireless-safety to Putin's prospects), another molestation charge against Woody Allen, Conrad Black harumphing about the economic non-recovery, Robert Fulford contemplating Japan and its recurring Yasukuni furore...
But the first thing that really grabs me is a letter to the editor about Mackenzie King's racism...
yet, yet another ongoing...
Thursday, December 26, 2013
A quick look at the morning newspaper
Brushing aside Nietzsche's excellent warning that reading first thing in the morning is vicious, I cast my breakfast eye on the Boxing Day edition of the Edmonton Journal, fresh out of the mailbox. Lots of flyers, of course, to keep the capitalist materialism clattering smartly along (Sobey's Liquor lures me with $4 off Muskoka Brewery's "Survival Pack"--a 12-box picturing a quaint gent in a Boer War-era hat holding four bottles of their product. The Maple Leaf Forev-urp!!)
The big story atop page-one is "Wolverine stronghold beckons researchers." Actually, considering what the oil industry is doing in Alberta, "weakhold" would be a better word. But you know how it is with journalists, journalese and rousing headlines.
It also occurs to me that in putting GPS trackers on wolverines, our researchers are committing a rather grotesque violation of the creatures' privacy. Really, it's none of the scientists' damn business what the wolverines do and where they go, right?
Simultaneously however, it occurs to me that it would have been (and still may be) an excellent idea to place such a tracker on Bob Dylan back in, say, 1962, with a little nano-cam at eye-level to tell us what the unrepentant bookworm is reading. Something tells me that in 1966-67 we would have seen a lot of Signet editions of Shakespeare, and overall we would suffer much less random blather from music critics and other Dylanologists.
As to the rest of the paper, from Legislature-dome repairs to the Canadian news-story of the year (Lac Megantic inferno trumps Rob Ford's druggie adventures) let me just abscond Don Henley's summary: "Looked at the headlines/ Put me in a real bad mood." Yep.
Toss it aside and get to work already.
The big story atop page-one is "Wolverine stronghold beckons researchers." Actually, considering what the oil industry is doing in Alberta, "weakhold" would be a better word. But you know how it is with journalists, journalese and rousing headlines.
It also occurs to me that in putting GPS trackers on wolverines, our researchers are committing a rather grotesque violation of the creatures' privacy. Really, it's none of the scientists' damn business what the wolverines do and where they go, right?
Simultaneously however, it occurs to me that it would have been (and still may be) an excellent idea to place such a tracker on Bob Dylan back in, say, 1962, with a little nano-cam at eye-level to tell us what the unrepentant bookworm is reading. Something tells me that in 1966-67 we would have seen a lot of Signet editions of Shakespeare, and overall we would suffer much less random blather from music critics and other Dylanologists.
As to the rest of the paper, from Legislature-dome repairs to the Canadian news-story of the year (Lac Megantic inferno trumps Rob Ford's druggie adventures) let me just abscond Don Henley's summary: "Looked at the headlines/ Put me in a real bad mood." Yep.
Toss it aside and get to work already.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Bob Dylan, Mencken and the old love train
One of the side-effects of researching Bob Dylan's roots in Shakespeare is a burgeoning grok that Dylan borrows liberally from anywhere and everywhere. Another Dylanologist, for instance, has uncovered a vast trove of Hemingway (and everything else from Chaucer to Joe Eszterhas) lurking between the lines of his songs as well as throughout his Chronicles memoir, and again there is the 2011 hullabaloo over Dylan's use of photos for some of his paintings. Yet again, as noted in a previous post, "Absolutely Sweet Marie" seems to be a tarted-up Emily Dickinson, and the song itself a remarkable sort of poetic critique, with references back to her verse.
Because of all this, as well as Dylan's listing of a truckload of influences in Chronicles, not to mention the Shakespeare-heap in the Basement Tapes that I'm STILL trying to size up (it's BIG, folks) my brain has been conditioned to look on just about every word he utters as a potential allusion. Moreover, since Dylan lists Sinclair Lewis reverently on the last page of Chronicles (and also on Blonde on Blonde--can anybody else spot the sly Lewis reference on that album?? Hint: go Mobile) last spring the suspicion popped into my head that eventually I'd trip over an allusion to H. L. Mencken somewhere in my Dylan wanderings. Didn't Sinclair Lewis, after all, dedicate Elmer Gantry to Mencken "with profound admiration"? Wasn't Dylan steeped in Fitzgerald, Hemingway and those other 20s literati with whom Mencken consorted? And the clincher for my paranoiac percolation: Dylan's translation of Shakespeare into surreal hillbilly strophes perhaps resembles Mencken's semi-comic translation of the Declaration of Independence into colloquial American.
But that was half a year ago and despite my anticipation... nothing. Then three weeks ago I was idly plowing through my typhoon-stricken office when I happened upon the three-volumes-in-one edition of memoirs, The Days of H. L. Mencken. This combined edition of 1947 has a short new introduction which I've long loved but not recently revisited, so I dug in. Ah yes, here was his nod to the ladies:
...many letters have come from women, and... most of them, especially those relating to Happy Days, have said in substance, "I had precisely the same experience." It never occurred to me in my youth, or to any other normal American boy of the time, that creatures in skirts and pigtails saw the world as we did. Yet it seems to have been the case, and I am glad of it, for it means that many grandmothers of today, like their husbands and brothers, cherish memories of an era when the world was a great deal more comfortable and amusing than it is today. We were lucky to have been born so soon. As the shadows close in we can at least recall that there was a time when people could spend weeks, months and even years without being badgered, bilked or alarmed...
And on he satirically goes, through the range of human folly, to the punchline and conclusion:
I enjoyed myself immensely, and all I try to do here is to convey some of my joy to the nobility and gentry of this once great and happy Republic, now only a dismal burlesque of its former self.
A typically good-natured bit of misanthropy, but the jolt here for a Dylan student would be the "burlesque" Republic, which must automatically suggest Dylan's Empire Burlesque. But alas, not quite a smoking pistol to be tagged and presented as evidence in court.
A few days later, however, a random quip by Mencken goes traipsing through my brain, as his many witticisms are wont to do: "Love is a season-pass on the shuttle between heaven and hell." (or something like that--punching "Mencken love season pass shuttle heaven hell" into Google's cyber-snouter fails to yield the exact quote). Then within seconds, the mysterious workings of my decrepit neurons upon the Mencken quip also rouse to mind, in some para-Google way, these Dylan lines from one of his classic love songs:
The train leaves at half-past ten
But it'll be back tomorrow at the same time again,
The conductor, he's weary,
He's still stuck on the line,
(Chorus)
But if I can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I'll keep it with mine.
(song: "I'll Keep It with Mine")
If this is a Mencken-extrapolation (I'd say it's a little short of a smoking pistol again) it's a damn good one, especially that "stuck on the line" shuttle-bit, for if Dylan knows his Mencken ($20 Canadian says he does) he'd know "stuck on the line" yields an elegant double-meaning (Dylan is very prolific in double-meanings) namely that Mencken, although his first published book was a poetic Ventures into Verse, in his later critic-incarnation he became very iffy and somewhat disparaging of poetry, which he considered a lesser art. Stuck on the "line" indeed.
But whatever Dylan's meaning(s), the overall idea of a love shuttle corresponds perfectly with Mencken, so that now I'm almost thinking Dylan's song wasn't really a love-tribute to Nico, as I originally heard (or Judy Collins as Wikipedia has it) but a sly paean to Mencken himself. Maybe?
If so, it certainly wouldn't be the first or last time Dylan wrote ardent verse to a member of the woody gender.
PS: I was also thinking that a reference to heaven and/or hell would really CLINCH the shuttle allusion, but nope, nothing. Then the pun hit me. I tweeted it about Dec. 9-10 @frameofmind if you can't spot it in the lyrics yourself...
PPS: The gobsmacker on Wikipedia is that the song was originally titled "Bank Account Blues" (!!!) Weird as Dylan, eh? Maybe it's me channeling that wacko Weberman (or vice versa) but I detect a few ppm of old "Tory" Mencken in that title too...
Because of all this, as well as Dylan's listing of a truckload of influences in Chronicles, not to mention the Shakespeare-heap in the Basement Tapes that I'm STILL trying to size up (it's BIG, folks) my brain has been conditioned to look on just about every word he utters as a potential allusion. Moreover, since Dylan lists Sinclair Lewis reverently on the last page of Chronicles (and also on Blonde on Blonde--can anybody else spot the sly Lewis reference on that album?? Hint: go Mobile) last spring the suspicion popped into my head that eventually I'd trip over an allusion to H. L. Mencken somewhere in my Dylan wanderings. Didn't Sinclair Lewis, after all, dedicate Elmer Gantry to Mencken "with profound admiration"? Wasn't Dylan steeped in Fitzgerald, Hemingway and those other 20s literati with whom Mencken consorted? And the clincher for my paranoiac percolation: Dylan's translation of Shakespeare into surreal hillbilly strophes perhaps resembles Mencken's semi-comic translation of the Declaration of Independence into colloquial American.
But that was half a year ago and despite my anticipation... nothing. Then three weeks ago I was idly plowing through my typhoon-stricken office when I happened upon the three-volumes-in-one edition of memoirs, The Days of H. L. Mencken. This combined edition of 1947 has a short new introduction which I've long loved but not recently revisited, so I dug in. Ah yes, here was his nod to the ladies:
...many letters have come from women, and... most of them, especially those relating to Happy Days, have said in substance, "I had precisely the same experience." It never occurred to me in my youth, or to any other normal American boy of the time, that creatures in skirts and pigtails saw the world as we did. Yet it seems to have been the case, and I am glad of it, for it means that many grandmothers of today, like their husbands and brothers, cherish memories of an era when the world was a great deal more comfortable and amusing than it is today. We were lucky to have been born so soon. As the shadows close in we can at least recall that there was a time when people could spend weeks, months and even years without being badgered, bilked or alarmed...
And on he satirically goes, through the range of human folly, to the punchline and conclusion:
I enjoyed myself immensely, and all I try to do here is to convey some of my joy to the nobility and gentry of this once great and happy Republic, now only a dismal burlesque of its former self.
A typically good-natured bit of misanthropy, but the jolt here for a Dylan student would be the "burlesque" Republic, which must automatically suggest Dylan's Empire Burlesque. But alas, not quite a smoking pistol to be tagged and presented as evidence in court.
A few days later, however, a random quip by Mencken goes traipsing through my brain, as his many witticisms are wont to do: "Love is a season-pass on the shuttle between heaven and hell." (or something like that--punching "Mencken love season pass shuttle heaven hell" into Google's cyber-snouter fails to yield the exact quote). Then within seconds, the mysterious workings of my decrepit neurons upon the Mencken quip also rouse to mind, in some para-Google way, these Dylan lines from one of his classic love songs:
The train leaves at half-past ten
But it'll be back tomorrow at the same time again,
The conductor, he's weary,
He's still stuck on the line,
(Chorus)
But if I can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I'll keep it with mine.
(song: "I'll Keep It with Mine")
If this is a Mencken-extrapolation (I'd say it's a little short of a smoking pistol again) it's a damn good one, especially that "stuck on the line" shuttle-bit, for if Dylan knows his Mencken ($20 Canadian says he does) he'd know "stuck on the line" yields an elegant double-meaning (Dylan is very prolific in double-meanings) namely that Mencken, although his first published book was a poetic Ventures into Verse, in his later critic-incarnation he became very iffy and somewhat disparaging of poetry, which he considered a lesser art. Stuck on the "line" indeed.
But whatever Dylan's meaning(s), the overall idea of a love shuttle corresponds perfectly with Mencken, so that now I'm almost thinking Dylan's song wasn't really a love-tribute to Nico, as I originally heard (or Judy Collins as Wikipedia has it) but a sly paean to Mencken himself. Maybe?
If so, it certainly wouldn't be the first or last time Dylan wrote ardent verse to a member of the woody gender.
PS: I was also thinking that a reference to heaven and/or hell would really CLINCH the shuttle allusion, but nope, nothing. Then the pun hit me. I tweeted it about Dec. 9-10 @frameofmind if you can't spot it in the lyrics yourself...
PPS: The gobsmacker on Wikipedia is that the song was originally titled "Bank Account Blues" (!!!) Weird as Dylan, eh? Maybe it's me channeling that wacko Weberman (or vice versa) but I detect a few ppm of old "Tory" Mencken in that title too...
Sunday, November 10, 2013
No country for sissies or nihilists (but scammers...)
One of the more surprising items in the ongoing climate war (now raging in theatres everywhere) is a surprise-attack on the cultural front. Not content with merely blitzing the field with armies of statistics and shooting off enough assertions of causality to make Aristotle's compost spin at 12,000 rpm in his grave...
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Climate change: the current epitome of the human comedy?
Trying to summarize the Hydra-headed beast that is climate change is a challenge, I'll admit.
Although the topic is a chronic invader of my brain, and, after picking up a "News & Opinion" section of a newspaper one morning and finding the issue is rampant upon its eight pages, I can still stare at the damn computer screen for 15 minutes trying to get the familiar herd of elephants in the room into some semblance of order.
It isn't just that the facts of global warming are mind-bogglingly complex (which they are). A huffer and puffer upon climate-science could simply point to the rapidly shrinking Arctic ice-cap, and thence to the Stockholm protesters on p.A23 with their eloquent "#debateisover" sign (hm, has the Guinness Book of World Records registered the world's first placard employing a hashtag?) and shout, grumble or quietly insist that it is clearly time to DO something. Cut the damn CO2 emissions already!
Ah, if only the solution were so easy. Then surely some bumbling attempt, at least, would already have happened. What?--you say several bumbling attempts HAVE been attempted? My gracious, then WHAT could be the problem?
Well, we all know the rogues' gallery: politicians beholden to big energy companies, stinking right-wing media-people and opinion-leaders also probably directly or indirectly on the payroll (that would be me, minus the followers and the payoff), misguided lay-folks in thrall to these politicians and sophists--in short everyone who can be lumped under the "denier" rubric. Refute these weaselly obstructionists, or better yet just knock them out of the way, and we will quickly get the CO2 under .400 again.
As I say, a very pleasant vision, and there are bleak days when I wish I could subscribe to it. Beats the hell out of getting a nano-second into a "but" and getting lumped with the deniers. For thus goes and thus has gone the "debate" now declared over. Be part of the problem or part of the solution, and God's mercy on anyone who thinks there might be any middle ground in this clear-cut Manicheism.
The Holy Grail of the climate-believers, as you probably know is an international agreement to reduce those CO2 emissions; my fundamental critique of this Grail is that we have no politician gutsy or foolhardy enough to play King Knud (aka Canute) and point out that things don't just happen because our omnipotent dictators order them to happen; and where the economic rubber meets the road, reducing CO2 in any significant way will likely necessitate some harsh and violent braking, harsher than was seen in the 2008 slowdown.
Do this thought-experiment..
Although the topic is a chronic invader of my brain, and, after picking up a "News & Opinion" section of a newspaper one morning and finding the issue is rampant upon its eight pages, I can still stare at the damn computer screen for 15 minutes trying to get the familiar herd of elephants in the room into some semblance of order.
It isn't just that the facts of global warming are mind-bogglingly complex (which they are). A huffer and puffer upon climate-science could simply point to the rapidly shrinking Arctic ice-cap, and thence to the Stockholm protesters on p.A23 with their eloquent "#debateisover" sign (hm, has the Guinness Book of World Records registered the world's first placard employing a hashtag?) and shout, grumble or quietly insist that it is clearly time to DO something. Cut the damn CO2 emissions already!
Ah, if only the solution were so easy. Then surely some bumbling attempt, at least, would already have happened. What?--you say several bumbling attempts HAVE been attempted? My gracious, then WHAT could be the problem?
Well, we all know the rogues' gallery: politicians beholden to big energy companies, stinking right-wing media-people and opinion-leaders also probably directly or indirectly on the payroll (that would be me, minus the followers and the payoff), misguided lay-folks in thrall to these politicians and sophists--in short everyone who can be lumped under the "denier" rubric. Refute these weaselly obstructionists, or better yet just knock them out of the way, and we will quickly get the CO2 under .400 again.
As I say, a very pleasant vision, and there are bleak days when I wish I could subscribe to it. Beats the hell out of getting a nano-second into a "but" and getting lumped with the deniers. For thus goes and thus has gone the "debate" now declared over. Be part of the problem or part of the solution, and God's mercy on anyone who thinks there might be any middle ground in this clear-cut Manicheism.
The Holy Grail of the climate-believers, as you probably know is an international agreement to reduce those CO2 emissions; my fundamental critique of this Grail is that we have no politician gutsy or foolhardy enough to play King Knud (aka Canute) and point out that things don't just happen because our omnipotent dictators order them to happen; and where the economic rubber meets the road, reducing CO2 in any significant way will likely necessitate some harsh and violent braking, harsher than was seen in the 2008 slowdown.
Do this thought-experiment..
Monday, October 14, 2013
Why high culture is always counterculture, but not vice versa
Tucked inconspicuously in the back of The Mencken Chrestomathy, in a section titled...
How to profit from the dollar-standard in the arts
Heaps and heaps and heaps of paper, and sitting atop one heap for the longest time, Hilton Kramer's The Revenge of the Philistines, subtitled: Art and Culture 1972-1984.
On the pretext of attacking and subduing the heap, I grab it and toss it onto my "immediate" heap of supposedly high-priority stuff. Neither as decisive or shrewd a move as I'm trying to make it...
On the pretext of attacking and subduing the heap, I grab it and toss it onto my "immediate" heap of supposedly high-priority stuff. Neither as decisive or shrewd a move as I'm trying to make it...
Whoa! Adbusters has a grand scheme for us!
Perhaps I have a twisted sense of humor, but it always strikes me as funny that I can pick up a copy of Adbusters at Safeway. The new revolution, plunked between Esquire and tubs of potato-salad, mine for only $12.99 plus GST (the price giving a fair indication how much advertising helps with cost of the average $5.99 to $7.99 glossy; and REALLY, why doesn't everybody just round up to the dollar?)
Adbusters has recently ditched its perverse oversize format for the normal 8x11 magazine size, but something about the last issue (some aspect of its always-fervent ideology, no doubt) annoyed me into passing it over, as I usually do. At the risk of revealing a punchy punchline without a spoiler-alert, Adbusters is solid leftie and this scoffer is implacable rightie. And maybe that is all you need to know.
But as occasionally happens, I grab a copy...
Adbusters has recently ditched its perverse oversize format for the normal 8x11 magazine size, but something about the last issue (some aspect of its always-fervent ideology, no doubt) annoyed me into passing it over, as I usually do. At the risk of revealing a punchy punchline without a spoiler-alert, Adbusters is solid leftie and this scoffer is implacable rightie. And maybe that is all you need to know.
But as occasionally happens, I grab a copy...
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