When Doc met Suzy (screenshots from Cannery Row)

Cannery Row: the hour of the pearl

A short excerpt from a book I return to again and again for spiritual renewal. It's not a book so much as an old friend I visit, and it does not disappoint.

No matter how hopeless

"This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain."


I didn't write that, troops. It was that Steinbeck feller, you know, the clever one. And I don't know for sure why it leapt into my mind at this late hour, or how dissonances are going to relate in this-hyarr particular post.

It all goes round and round. You put a book out, it has taken you years and years to get to this point, it's suddenly "out", and you're sitting there waiting for something to happen. It doesn't transport your life or change the fact you need to lose weight or even lift your intermittent depression interspersed by Walmartian visitations of euphoria.


No kidding. Right in the middle of Walmart, the retiree's home away from home, looking for an economy-size sack of birdseed for my bird, I am hit with blinding euphoria: MY BOOK IS OUT. Harold, we made it! After six years of wandering around the desert, of having him roaming around in my head, he is "out", he is the word made flesh. And for that sublime, dazzling moment, I crest the top of the rollercoaster.


By the time I get home my pants are too tight and it's starting all over again. The divine/obscene comedy.

I've been obsessed with Don Quixote. Everybody is obsessed with Don Quixote because he makes them feel better about their own lives. At least we aren't some nut case crashing around with a lance. But we love him at the same time, for he takes the fall. He dies for our sins. There is something Christly about him, and Cervantes knew it. The holy fool. A sort of gaunt, underfed anti-clown. I started listening to the mind-lurching, emotionally-intoxicating Richard Strauss tone poem recently, with Yo Yo Ma on cello as the voice of Quixote. Oh God oh God oh.


And yes, you don't even need words to see and hear him. Then of course I had to go on YouTube to look up that documentary, that Terry Gilliam thing I watched when it first came out. Years ago. How he tried to make a film, an update of Quixote, and everything fell into the shit to a monumental, even Biblical degree. Everything was literally swept away until there was nothing left but rubble. This film made EVERYONE feel better, but everyone, even heroin addicts on death's door! But seriously, schadenfreude aside, what people were really reacting to and feeling deeply was the courage it takes to let your dream fall apart in full view, though thank God WE don't possess that kind of courage and never will.

We say failure is good, but it isn't. Failure is just failure. I guess it's inevitable, but who likes it, who really embraces it? Those motivational speakers are so full of shit their eyes are brown. In spite of Walmart birdseed raptures, my book likely won't go very far. It won't do a Quixote swandive either, but them's the breaks. I don't think Terry Gilliam lost out in the end, for somebody made soup out of the whole thing, and it was fascinating soup.


Most of us have had times when things have seriously fallen apart, when there's nothing we can do to hold it together. Might be serious illness, or a whole lot of people suddenly die in a row, like fucking dominoes. Or a job just falls out from under and there's nothing to dive into, no safety net at all. Or the safety net throws you up in the air so violently you wish you'd landed on cement.

So I hear this burningly idealistic, almost indecently gorgeous Quixote music by Richard Strauss,and then of course I must look up that song, you know, the one that was so popular in the '60s that everybody recorded it, even Liberace. Or Liberace's horse, I forget which. But I found, on an old kinescope of The Ed Sullivan Show, an 11-minute segment, a live, un-lip-synched slice of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, when it was brand new and still wet. And I found Richard Kiley singing it with heartbreaking devotion, just beautifully. I found a studio recording of him singing it with much more polish, but I never want to hear that one again. In this one he's standing in front of an audience, garish stage makeup all over his face, and every phrase is shaped as if with his own hands and ends with a little sigh. There's a catch in his voice here and there, as if it's almost too much for him, and the timbre of his voice is like a trumpet or trombone, the burnish and generosity and flash of the vibrato, the chest tones. This is coming from a human being. And I'm thinking.

The song is very short and compact, two minutes, and the lyric simple. The tune is something that sounds like it has always been there.


Dissonances relate. This is all about impossible quests, longing and questing, and holy idiots falling down into the mud. I feel like a goddamn fool sometimes, as if I'm on my fourth marriage and it's coming apart, as if I fell for it again. Haven't learned a thing. I remember when the idea for The Glass Character first leapt into my head. Now he is a book, he's outside myself. He lives, and he's in other people's hands, even if they aren't reading it! He's probably in Rich Correll's hands and Kevin Brownlow's hands, even if THEY aren't reading it. Today in Walmart, with the bag of birdseed in my hand, that was a glorious thing. Though at this moment, sitting here, I am not sure why.

A lot of people identify with Quixote because he is seemingly crazy, but everybody loves him anyway and he never has to go for shock treatments or be in the hospital. It's a freedom not granted to many. A lot of people like Quixote because humanity is very dark indeed, and we all want someone to take the fall for us. That's what drama is all about. Fiction is about trouble, poorly resolved or not resolved at all, and no matter how shitty our lives may be, they're a damn sight less shitty than Ahab's over there, he can be counted on to act it all out for us, to bear the brunt, to be humiliated or even killed in our place.

Sort of Christly, wouldn't you think?

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

The world is not respectable: favorite quotes

An artist, a man, a failure, MUST PROCEED. Proceed: not succeed. With success, as any world or unworld comprehends it, he has essentially nothing to do. If it should come, well and good: but what makes him climb to the top of the tent emphatically isn’t ‘a billion empty faces’. Even success in his own terms cannot concern him otherwise than as a stimulus to further, and a challenge to more unimagineable, self-discovering – ‘The chairs will all fall by themselves down from the wire’; and who catches or who doesn’t catch them is none of his immortal business. One thing, however, does always concern this individual: fidelity to himself.

- e. e. cummings

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

- George Santayana

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

- Henry Miller



This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.

- John Steinbeck

So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.

–Friedrich Nietzsche


You wouldn’t be so concerned about what people think of you if you knew how seldom they did.

- Anon.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Why dogs are NOT babies: a strike for canine dignity

I have a bookshelf in our bedroom, one that I seldom add to, if ever. I don’t know what to call it exactly, except that it has books in it that I return to, that I love, that are warm baths to the soul.

The only trouble is, they keep changing.

I will go back to reread, for the 14th time, one of these cuddly old familiar books, and suddenly it’s not so cuddly any more. Or not so well-written. I’d give you a list of them all, but it would embarrass me.

Something has happened over the years, especially since I began taking seriously the process of writing fiction. Oh all right, after being a book reviewer for 25 years: I think I know crap from the real thing, but it’s not exactly that.

It’s the ability to spot writers’ card tricks.

There’s a little bit of conjurer in every writer, whether fiction or non-. Hell, more than a little! What does a conjurer do? He makes stuff appear, usually out of nowhere. Such as plots and scenarios and dialogue which seems to just sprout up off the page.

All this is a long lead-in to one of my warm-bath books, one I decided to pull down off the shelf for the first time in years. It’s a very old paperback, circa 1962, probably belonged to my mother originally and floated into my hands the way these things do. It’s not just yellowed but browned, and has that punky stale smell of very old paper.

It’s Travels with Charley.

This is probably John Steinbeck’s most popular book (and the spiky red banner shouts at the top, “The #1 National Bestseller, Now Only 75 cents! OVER A MILLION COPIES IN PRINT!”) It’s touted as a first-person, nonfiction account of Steinbeck’s road trip across America, kind of like the thing Charles Kuralt did on TV a long time ago, where he travels the length and breadth of the United States (“He saw things which stirred his anger and things which made him swell with pride”), and talks to all sorts of down-home, folksy types, including a few racists.

The only problem with it is that it’s almost pure fiction.

I didn’t find all this out until I Wiki’d Steinbeck and Travels with Charley and discovered this bit of information:

Bill Barich, who wrote Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America, a retracing of Steinbeck's footsteps, said:

"I'm fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book. The dialogue is so wooden. Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He'd become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson. The die was probably cast long before he hit the road, and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country. His perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that."

A genius is a genius, for a’ that. The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men ain't nothing to sneeze at. So the book is still worth a read, but this time through I noticed that, here and there anyway, nails stuck out and seams showed. One whole chapter (which felt suspiciously like padding to bring the page count up to 200) was about snooping around in a hotel room that hadn’t been made up yet, and his detective-style piecing together of details on the previous occupant, whom he called Lonesome Harry. This was supposedly a travelling businessman who had written a guilty letter to his wife (crumpled up in the wastebasket, of course) before getting drunk (empty bottle of Jack Daniels) and entertaining a prostitute called Lucille (carmine lipstick and raven hair on the pillow!).

Steinbeck’s son, John Jr., was quoted as saying, “He just sat in his camper and made up all this shit."

All right, all right. We’re finally getting to the real point of this ramble: not just the discovery of cracks and holes in the work of a legendary writer, but said writer’s observations about dogs.

It’s really the best part of the book. As he drove his camper (romantically named Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse) all over the length and breadth of said United States, his companion was an elderly standard poodle called Charley. If Charley had more character than most of the people Steinbeck supposedly interviewed, it was no accident. He was one noble dog, able to see through the shadiest of humans with aplomb (whatever aplomb is – I’ve never figured it out).

Charley, being far too old to take this sort of trip and probably being let out to pee once a day, keeps getting sick, predictably with urinary problems. This necessitates taking him to vets several times. But it’s Steinbeck’s take on people who treat their dogs like children which made me sit up and take notice.

It made more sense than anything I’d read in a long time and made up for some of the vacuous drivel ("MUST READ: Seven Sex Secrets the Kardashians Don't Want You to Know") that I read on Facebook.

“On the other hand, I yield to no one in my distaste for the self-styled dog-lover, the kind who heaps up his frustrations and makes a dog carry them around. Such a dog-lover talks baby talk to mature and thoughtful animals, and attributes his own sloppy characteristics to them until the dog becomes in his mind an alter ego. Such people, it seems to me, in what they imagine to be kindness, are capable of inflicting long and lasting tortures on an animal, denying it any of its natural desires and fulfillments until a dog of weak character breaks down and becomes the fat, asthmatic, befurred bundle of neuroses. When a stranger addresses Charley in baby talk, Charley avoids him. For Charley is not a human; he’s a dog, and he likes it that way. He feels that he is a first-rate dog and has no wish to be a second-rate human.”

In the past few years I have seen an alarming, even nauseating rise in dog-worship: people who lavish far more energy and attention and even affection on their dogs than they do on their own children or spouse. “He’s my ba-a-aby,” I hear over and over again, in the same swooping, crooning tone, a tone their children have never heard. I don’t know what this means, but it makes me squirm. As Steinbeck states, he’s a dog, not a baby. Is it the fact that this baby never grows up, is subservient and expected to be obedient, that you OWN it and therefore are always in control? Is it the fact that, in loving your dog, you will never have to deal with all the complications and vicissitudes of loving a human being?

Or do some people genuinely prefer them? The whining, the supplicating tail-wags, the slobbering tongue on the face (“Awwwwwww!”), the endless barking, the fleas, the leg-humps, the . . . you get the idea.

The point is, dogs are NOT babies, certainly not baby humans, and an adult dog isn’t even a baby dog. We infantilize them by insisting that they are, and we rob them of their animal dignity. The “unconditional love” they give us has an awful lot to do with the fact that they know where their food and shelter comes from.

I don’t think dogs are capable of “love”. Attachment, yes. Perhaps a certain loyalty, if I’m not anthropomorphizing too much. The capacity to guard and protect, bred in for millennia. It can seem like love. But does something you own really have the capacity to love you?

To a person who has given up on human nastiness and betrayal, turning away from humans and loving their canine “babies” can seem like a step towards emotional liberation. But it isn’t. It's escape. We were never meant to love another species that way. When speaking of authentic, mature, mutual love, there are no substitutions.

Alarmingly, I’ve seen many TV documentaries about people who keep exotic animals such as poisonous snakes and tigers as pets. In almost every case, the owner speaks of the animals as “my babies” (or “muh buhyy-beeze”, depending on where they come from). A 500-pound Bengal tiger, restlessly pacing in a small chain-link enclosure and alertly looking for clues to the next kill, becomes “like one of my own kids”.

What is this all about? I have a dreadful feeling it’s about alienation, about a culture where clicking a little device in your hand passes for conversation and people tweet by their mother's deathbed. It's about giving up on the human species altogether. What alarms me is the extent to which it is escalating and thus becoming "normal". There’s a bitterness about it, along with a strange lack of awareness of the real dynamics of the situation. These people look right at it and don't see it, a form of soul-blindness which I perceive as one of the worst forms of mental illness.

What does it mean when you buy your “baby” from a breeder, keep your “baby” in a yard and walk it around on a leash? It's called "ownership", and it's not that much different from owning a swimming pool or a car or a gun. Your possession won't talk back, grow up, move away from home. Until it dies (its life usually needlessly prolonged as an act of appalling selfishness on the part of the owner), he will belong to you, he will be your property and will never change.

Certain Godzilla-mothers, the kind who devour their children's identities whole, would like to own and operate and control their offspring, but these children usually insist on breaking away to save their own lives. Enter the dog, the boo-boo, the “baaaaaayyy-beeeeeeee” who rescues the whole situation, offering “unconditional love” and face-slobbering in charge for plenty of Kibbles n’ Bits.

I don’t get it. But then, to me, a dog is just a dog. Is there anything wrong with that?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Iconic cupcakes and other irrelevancies

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind—the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning.

John Steinbeck

This WILL make sense: itwillitwillitwillitwillitwill. . . and if it doesn't, it's cuzzadafact that I just got up and am not yet fully awake and have many other things to do.

I've been compiling a list of things that belong together, mainly because they annoy the shit out of me. If they seem dissonant, irrelevant, etc. (I almost said "whatever"!), then bear with me. Soon all this nonsense will wear a crown of meaning.

 

The cupcake theme leads the way, more or less, because cupcakes have become ubiquitous since that moment some time in the '90s when Carrie and Miranda sat there on a park bench cramming their faces with cake and talking about (what else?) "crushes".

Cupcakes might've become Big (to coin a phrase, an awful one) anyway, but somehow-or-other, perhaps because of Carrie spitting out little pieces of cake while she waxed all giggly like someone in high school,  they blew into the stratosphere - imagine  little multi-colored sparkly-icinged projectiles raining down on us all - and still dominate kids' birthday parties, baby showers and even WEDDINGS.

No more does the bride-to-be fuss and twitter (I mean "twitter", not "tweet") about that dire necessity of marriage, the wedding cake. She won't have one anyway. It'll be a cement-frosted edifice made oout f styrofoam and it will cost $1550.99.

No, she will fuss and twitter about importing "special" cupcakes like the ones Carrie and Miranda ate 18 years ago on Sex and the City. From the Magnolia Bakery in New York.

This is how cupcakes become. . .(and here is my point - yes, there is one - ) iconic. And if cupcakes can become iconic, so can everything else.

The word is thrown around so casually these days that no one notices any more. James Bond has his iconic martini. The Kardashians have their iconic stupidity. Justin Bieber has his iconic stupid haircut. Simon Cowell has his iconic nastiness.  And I'd think of more, but I don't have to: just listen for it for one day and you'll see.

So what is an icon? It's a symbol so culturally significant that it comes to stand for a whole world of meaning. I think it even has religious importance, a focus for prayer or worship. It hardly relates to cupcakes. But in this air-puffed, sugar-spun world, maybe it does.

 

Let's get the next one out of the way now because it nauseates me so much:  "awesome". In the course of a day, I hear this 29,000 times, to the point that it means nothing at all. In fact, its empty-headed non-meaning is worming its way into the dictionary, as so many non-words eventually do.

"Here's your change."

"Awesome."

"I had my shoe fixed."

"Awesome."

"My AIDS test came out negative."

"Awesome."

And so on, and on, and on.

If something really is "awesome", such as whatever-that-American-thingie-is-called, Mount Rushmore, or Old Faithful, or the Sistene Chapel or something, I don't know what the response would be because you've already used up "awesome" on all those stupid, empty-headed, meaningless things.

I saw a book not long ago: 500 Things that are  Awesome, or some-such. I flipped through it and, as my Jewish brethren say, plotzed. One of the things they listed as "awesome" was your colon. It described in detail its role in processing human shit as it made its way out your - I won't go any further, but hey, it's "awesome", isn't it?

Another one I'm hearing every day: "surreal". Maybe it's because our whole world is surreal now. But it's being applied to everything, i. e. the plumbing failing or having to take your cat to the vet. "He was throwing up furballs. It was surreal." Why do these words catch on? Is it a disease, and how soon before we all start scratching?

I will add to this "no problem" in place of "you're welcome".

"Thanks for loaning me $5,000,000.00 till payday."

"No problem."

What does this mean exactly? "This is not a problem." " There is no problem here." Why say that instead of the courteous non-phrase "you're welcome" (which doesn't mean very much either)?

People say it BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS SAYING IT. Mooooooooo!

But the lowing herds of humanity don't stop there. "You betcha" sometimes stands in for "No problem," and means even less.

I don't know if this is a catch-phrase or just a stupidity, but whenever something disastrous happens, a fire or a shooting or 9-11 or anything on a traumatic, unexpected scale, everyone says, "I thought I was in a movie."

No one seems fully present in reality any more. It's all watched on some sort of vast screen in 3D, and we're just spectators with no active role. "It looked like a movie." "I heard some sort of popping noise."

That popping noise is GUNFIRE, you fucking idiots, and that is what it really sounds like, not the "BLAMMMMM!"  that has stood in for decades on TV and in movies. It's a sound that comes out of some sort of central sound effects bank, and it's the only way movie directors can convince people that a gun has actually been fired. It's kind of like cars exploding into fireballs when someone lights a match. It doesn't happen that way, but it has nevertheless become our collective reality.

So when someone fires a real gun, it sounds kind of like a muted firecracker, a puh-puh sound, and no one dives for cover but just stands there stupidly waiting to be shot because THIS MUST BE A MOVIE. Which might be followed by another statement (if such a thing were possible):

"This must be dead."