Monday, February 20, 2012

Hard, hard, hard



This popped into my head for the first time in years as I had a phone conversation with a dear friend tonight. It seems we are both wrestling with similar things. It has become apparent to us how much easier it is (for some people) to be "benevolent", "socially conscious", sensitive to world issues and the "bleeding crowd", than it is to be vulnerable and caring and human on the level of one heart to one heart.

Easy to be hard.

This is the original cast version from Hair, sung by Lynn Kellog, and I used to listen to it obsessively in 1968 (OK, I hereby date myself as an ageing flower child). I had no idea how great her voice was because back then it all sort of washed over me in a pot-induced haze.

She sings it simply in a great contralto voice, but the emotion is tremendous and the lyric is delivered with devastating impact. Do you only care about the bleeding crowd? How about a needing friend?

I need a friend.



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

Tom Robbins on February: you may be little, but you're small!



They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.



Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes – and you’ll never catch February in stocking feet – it’s a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April’s nose.











However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behaviour that grows quickly old.






February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.







Except to the extent that it “tints the buds and swells the leaves within,” February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay.



James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginnings, although worse at knowing when to stop.





If February is the colour of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you’re small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume






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

Sunday, February 19, 2012

The leprechaun from hell





This is one of John Candy's finest moments. He plays a giant, vindictive leprechaun wielding a shilellagh (sp.? Does anyone know how to spell this?) and pushing his special brand of "rainbow meat",  chock full of chemicals. I miss John Candy so. In many ways he was the glue holding SCTV together. His movie career, while it had some great moments, never quite came up to the wild creativity of his SCTV days, with its multiple and often complex characters. This is just plain wonderful!




Unlucky Charms


Top ten reasons why some Irish Americans have no real clue about Ireland

Loud and too proud many Irish Americans make a very bad impression

By JAMES FARRELL, IrishCentral Contributer

Published Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 7:23 AM

My American friends always tell me how they love Ireland. But when I stayed in Chicago in the 1990s they described an Ireland I never knew existed. On a recent visit back, it seems that little has changed.

Maybe a little self-awareness and education about how the Irish really live might help.

1. We don’t live in thatched cottages anymore -- get real. We’re an urbanized society and have the same living standards as the rest of the world.

2. We don’t say faith and begorrah or chase Leprechauns -- Hollywood has infected the brains of too many Irish Americans. We don’t believe in fairies, banshees, or leprechauns, unless it is for gullible Americans.

3. We don’t drink all day and fight all night. Too many showings of ‘The Quiet Man’ have pickled some Irish American brains. We like a drink but we rarely fight.


4. We don’t hate the British any more. Sure we did once, but we’re best friends for years now since the peace process, the Queen’s visit was totally popular.

5. We generally don’t like American Republicans. We are much more comfortable with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and their nuanced international world view than cowboys like George Bush and Ronald Reagan -- sorry all you Tea Party Irish.

6. We don’t really think you are Irish, the same way as us. If you are not born here then by our definition you are not Irish.



7. We don’t really like "Danny Boy" and all the sentimental songs. Sure, they are fine for a late night sing song for Americans but we are fed up of them.

8. We often tell jokes about you, usually about the phony Irish accents and Aran sweaters

9. We don’t know the Murphys from Cork or the Sullivans from Kerry, there are thousands of them.



10. We don’t want to hear any more Irish drinking jokes -- they are pathetic and demeaning to us for the most part.
*James Farrell is an Irish writer now living in Dublin

Yes! This just about sums it up. It must be irritating for the Irish to be stuck with these mostly inane stereotypes. (Thus the green typeface.) As the illustrations prove, and by the way they are MEANT TO BE IRONIC, FOLKS, NOT LITERAL, SO DO NOT CALL ME AN IGNORANT RACIST, this sometimes took the form of a vicious discrimination so primitive it defies analysis. The infamous "no dogs or Irish" rule proved that white people could treat white people with the same dehumanizing cruelty as blacks and Native Americans.

My own family had a rather ludicrous pride in the fact that we were "Irish", having descended from the Pedlows, which is about as Irish a name as I've ever heard. My mother eventually admitted to me that my "Irish" grandmother had been born in Canada. Though she always said I was "one-quarter Irish", now it seems to be more like 1/8. Are my children 1/16, and my grandchildren 1/32? Am I doing the math right? As Jonathan Winters once said about his Comanche heritage, "One nosebleed and I'm out of the tribe."



I worked all this into my first novel, Better than Life, exaggerating it so that the Connars believed that even a drop of Irish blood (and what exactly IS Irish blood, anyway?) made you a son or daughter of Eire. Erin go Blagggh, and all that stuff.

I had a cousin Eileen, OK. And another, Deirdre, though that can also be English, I think. Or is it Celtic?



I'm not sure why no one thinks of William Butler Yeats or James Joyce when they're rhyming off these Irish stereotypes: the bleak, often hopeless literary genius, grimly foretelling an apocalyptic future, light years ahead of his time but hard to sit next to at the bar. No doubt they went for a pint at the end of a long day of dystopic anhedonia, but not with the suicidal fervor that killed off the Welsh genius, Dylan Thomas, at the age of 39.









(Sorry. I had to throw in a little Separated at Birth.)


Saturday, February 18, 2012

Can I retire from life?


This has been brewing for a while, and whether or not anyone wants to “view” it is quite beside the point.


My husband recently retired from a 40-year career as an environmental engineer. This only happened a few weeks ago, and since then it’s like the air slowly being let out of a balloon – not so much into depression as exhausted relief from a stress that has dogged him for years.


Now he’s tinkering, the thing he likes best in the world, fixing things in the garage, contemplating home renovations large and small, taking over all the cooking (to my endless delight – I am SO tired of fixing meals, and he’s a much better cook than me anyway).


And I am looking at myself and wondering. A friend recently quoted an older woman she knows. “They retire. We don’t.” It made me think. It certainly would apply to the old style of marriage where wife waited on husband hand-and-foot. Not being the handmaiden type, I prefer a self-serve husband who heats up his own  beans because I hate the things (and scrape the bean-scum out of that pot while you’re at it).


But still. They retire. We don’t. Or I don’t. Retire from what? From this miasma of desire, this scrambling to try to get a foothold on something that will probably escape me forever?




Like a lot of people, I wanted to be a published author. It too me oh, so long to get there. And I did. Supposedly.
But “published author” is a relative term. It's sort of like saying “I have an income from writing”: which I do, and which I have had since 1984. But if you mention the size of the income (and you’d be surprised how many people ask), all you get is snickers or looks of amazement that you’d put that much effort into something that earns you less than the average paper boy.


I want to quit the whole thing: I want to quit wanting. I want to quit having my work up there, or out there, where brickbats can be thrown at it. I recently was really worked over for something I wrote, and it was not very pleasant. She had a right to feel the way she did, because what I said was wrong and I will always regret it. I did not think it through at all.   I think my attempt at an apology was only poked full of more holes, so I could not win.


This happens, a lot. Not just to me, though I've been reamed out many a time, often for no crime except being visible and expressing an opinion. I've seen commentary that is simply appalling all over the internet, including on YouTube videos of disabled children and babies with terminal deformities. People can be absolute shits, and they’re almost encouraged to be. Ridicule rules the day. It’s easy, because nobody really knows who you are.


The internet and blogs and social networking have changed everything: it’s often said, but never adequately understood. Everything is lived out in public.  As the old Moxy Fruvous song says, “Everyone’s a novelist, and everyone can sing/But no one talks when the TV’s on.” This  all implies a certain amount of exposure. We’re all nude in front of the cameras, folks, in a way that’s making George Orwell turn over in his grave.






So I was laid bare, peeled, not realizing what the full ramifications would be. The worst name I was called during that whole tirade was “amateur”. What does that mean? Is it tied to a certain amount of money? What amount? Is there a minimum? Could it be ANY amount? Or do you really have to earn anything at all?


I want to quit this. Writing is what I do, and it’s hard for me not to do it. Blogging for the most part has been fun, sometimes exhilarating, with very mixed results in the viewing department. I have had thousands, and zeros, and everything in between.





But that’s just the trouble. Views are like “friends” on Facebook. I know people with thousands of “friends”. How is this possible? How would you have time to “meet” all those people and still hold a job, or even attend to your basic bodily functions?


How deep are these friendships, or do they just bump along the surface in a world that sometimes seems like it is ALL surface?


I tend to illustrate my posts, and some like this, and some hate it and think it is stupid. The title of my blog was recently ridiculed:  never mind that the person didn’t get it, that the intentional sentimental irony of it flew right over their head. Misinterpretation rules in the land of bloghood, does it not?





I want to quit. Quit this. Quit it, resign, retire, leave. Walk. I don’t know if I can walk from writing and I don’t know if I can quit blogging, or caring, but I want to. I don’t want to send any more “queries” by mail. I don’t want to get any more stamped self-addressed envelopes in the mail, miserable little things with (usually) form rejections in them, or, once in a while, personal rejections, which are supposed to be better because they're not forms.

It’s great, in fact we think it’s a potential bestseller, but sorry, we can’t publish it because it doesn’t suit our list. 


I’ve let this get to me, haven't I? Yes. I’ve let critics get under my skin. Shame on me.  If I answer critics, I am peevish and hypersensitive and can’t accept a constructive comment. If I don’t, I don’t care or am too snotty to reply. If I apologize for writing something that is out of line, the apology is never enough because I somehow have to reverse time like Superman turning the world backwards in that movie and unwrite what I wrote. Anything less is cause for more jabs in my most tender places.



My so-called career, the thing I feel so ambivalent about and now would like to drop like a whole bag of hammers, is like a balloon just brushing the tips of my fingers. When I try to grab for it, it pops up beyond my reach. Stop trying then, they say. Just let it fall. Then I probably won’t want it anyway.



From worrying about whether I will ever see my work in print again, I QUIT.


From wondering if writing this will make one tinker’s goddamn of a difference to anyone, I QUIT.


From trying to entertain or please, something I had to do to survive as a child, I quit. No more court jester stuff, it’s killing me.


From trying to figure out whether certain other (mostly scarily anonymous) people are human or reptilian, I most definitely quit.



The internet is a no-man’s-land, a bizarre wonderland/wasteland that nobody has figured out yet. It has its exhilarating aspects, connecting with strangers (who could be anybody, by the way, even psychotic killers), getting “support” from other people who are addicted to sniffing Drano or whatever, and glopping up moploads of information from Wikipedia that may or may not have any truth in it at all. Then there are the darker aspects.


People are adopting babies through Facebook, and selling them on eBay. Men look at internet porn at work: even cops (it happened here not long ago, and they got into a spot of trouble). Suddenly it seems like eroticism has become as ugly as a rhinoceros, torn loose and galloping free. Four-year-old girls are being dressed up like prostitutes and encouraged to act like them.  Sometimes I want to bring back corsets, restraint, Sigmund Freud telling us that if libido is ever let loose, society will crumble in a matter of months.




But I digress. My work is now out there where “some” people can “sometimes” see it, and in fact I probably have had more views in a year of blogging than I had readers in 15 years of writing newspaper columns. I am still beavering away, and just getting so tired. Just wanting to throw away something that feels like an arm. You can’t throw your arm away, can you?


I resign from the monster I have created for myself, tugged and pulled by the nasty little bugger we call the internet. I just want to write because I want to write, because I feel like it. It can be as dumb as dirt. I can call it Barbie’s Sparkle-Plenty Pink Plastic Dream House and laugh if people take it literally and call ME stupid.



Wanting to be understood, wanting someone or anyone to "get" you, is the province of adolescence, is it not? But what happens when it never happens, when at the advanced aget of (blbblblb) you realize you're never going to be "got" so you might as well get over it?

From wanting too much, from wanting anything at all, I quit, I resign, I fold, I surrender, I submit! Submission is a wonderful thing, is it not? I do it all the time. Just ask my editor.






 



Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


Thursday, February 16, 2012

"I met him at the candy store": more dumb songs I like




 Is she really going out with him?




Well, there she is, let's ask her

Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?
Mhmm.



Gee, it must be great riding with him

Is he picking you up after school today? Uh uh.










By the way, where'd you meet him?

I met him at the candy store

He turned around and smiled at me

You get the picture? (Yes, we see)

That's when I fell for the leader of the pack






My folks were always putting him down

(Down, down)

They said, he came from the wrong side of town







(What you mean when you say that he came

From the wrong side of town?)

They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad





That's why I fell for the leader of the pack





One day my dad said, "Find someone new"

I had to tell my Jimmy, we're through





(What you mean when you say that

You better go find somebody new?)

He stood there and asked me why, all I could do was cry

I'm sorry I hurt you, the leader of the pack









He sort of smiled and kissed me good-bye

The tears were beginnin' to show

As he drove away on that rainy night

I begged him to go slow

But whether he heard, I'll never know





(Look out, look out!

Look out, look out!)





I felt so helpless, what could I do?

Rememberin' all the things we'd been through







At school they all stop and stare

I can't hide the tears but I don't care

I'll never forget him, the leader of the pack






(Gone, gone, gone, gone)

The leader of the pack, now he's gone





(Gone)






The leader of the pack, now he's gone





(Gone, gone, gone, gone)








The leader of the pack, now he's gone





(Gone)






The leader of the pack.