Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!


Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!



Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself. 

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?




So the name itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. "Mentally ill" is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). But it's still inadequate.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.





I hate stigma. I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve the ugly term, detach it and throw it away. 





"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.  

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"?  Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the 'poor soul" attitude that prevails?





But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior". 





One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.





Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark.  I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its finest and most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?




Monday, March 10, 2014

Bursting Blings and Beta: the lost art of the basement tape




The past swims before my eyes. Or rather lurches and jostles, violently, in violet colors, with that grainy, almost sparkling lower frame which is the telltale sign of the 30-year-old Beta-format videotape. Something happens to these tapes when allowed to stew in their own nitrates in somebody's basement for two or three decades. A chemical change comes over them - an alchemy - and like a good friend going through a bad divorce, they come out Different. They go bad, actually, denature and denitrate (though they're probably not made of nitrate at all but some cheap acetate like a whore's stocking), but in some brilliant way they also spring into unique works of moving art. Thus Rich Correll, as he forever bounds on to the stage with his gigantic Citizen-Kane-sized name in lights, seems to strobe jubilantly as he saunters towards the towering structure that is the Squares, his appearance evanescent, almost incandescent as the Beta tape catches that fleeting second, that instant in time which is the Hollywood Squares Leave it to Beaver Day.




And here, a brilliantly-striped, strobing Rich sounds forth on something, the contents of which we will never know, but how beautifully he does it, in his violet/magenta/chartreuse/indigo tones interspersed with gaudy flashes of carmine. Beyond graininess or distortion, this thing has just gone all to hell with color, a striated peacock-tail of almost indecent hue, as if the colors were leaping and strobing right out of Rich Correlll's own creative head as he sits in that square behind his name. I wish there were some sort of magic crayon or acrylic or whatever that would paint in jostling, violently jiggling multicolored lines like that, for then I might be able to make something resembling art. The closest I've ever come is the Blingee, and to be honest the Blingee is not a very satisfying art form unless you sign up and pay for all those extras, like exploding flamingos and such.






But in a vain attempt to recapture the psychedelic, even hallucinogenic atmosphere of the aforementioned Hollywood Squares Beta clips, here are a couple of Blingees, I mean the kind you get if you don't sign up or pay, which look pretty low-res to me. The graceful fireworks I saw when I made this thing have sort of gone all to pot and turned into three-frames-per-second jerks. Oh well, chalk it up to low technology, which can, after all, have a beauty all its own.







Sunday, March 9, 2014

Horrific medical practices: even worse than now!






I guarantee you will find this photo gallery both horrific and fascinating. Most shocking are the attitudes behind each practice: a woman with an artifical leg hides her face in shame. Mental patients are wrapped mummylike in wet sheets and laid out in corpselike rows. "Female remedies" (for what??) imply that femaleness itself is a disease.




Come along if you dare.


http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/83858344/



Order The Glass Character from Amazon.com

Order The Glass Character from Chapters/Indigo.ca

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Short fiction: Big Booky



Dear God, but it had been a long time. A desert of eon time when climbing back on the horse of creative longing seemed so remote as to be impossible. When the new novel finally came to her, she felt like Sarah in the Bible, finding out she was pregnant at the age of - what was, it, 113? Some unlikely number like that.

She fell into her third novel, plunged down into it like a waterslide, as if the years between books were melting, no longer glaring her in the face. The writing of it was a revelation, a year and a half of panting fainting work, pursuing and pursuing. And then came the three-year hunger.

Three years of nearly giving up hope. 

Because nobody wanted it.

Nobody had the slightest interest in it.

Her friends felt that it was all right.

Or maybe they were trying to make her feel better.

"Just be glad you can write again."

"I am."

"Just  be satisfied with the process."


"I am."

"It's still a book, even though nobody reads it."

"No it's not."





The three years entailed so many inquiries that fell on barren soil that she came close to giving up, and for eleven months wouldn't blog or go on Facebook or do any of the shenanigans writers had to do now to look hip and relevant and survive. Her mind went back to the first novel, the fizzy joy, the sense that a lifetime of longing had been completed (with no way of knowing that the longing would soon come back and stay forever). 

She remembered the lovely lady at the big bookstore, the one local writers called (somewhat scornfully) Big Booky. Her name was Jeannine and she was a big bustling lady who looked like an old-time travel agent, before the internet spoiled it all. Someone who could have been a social director on the Love Boat. She was so thrilled to set up a launch for a local author, and it all went so well, there was such a good turnout, and then two years later it happened again! There was no stopping her now, and everyone knew it. Everything was aces up, she could do no wrong.

And then.

The famine, a plague of Biblical proportions. A trudge, or a slow slither through thick dust. Years and years of just surviving, of wondering where the wonder went.





In the meantime, while the rest of life just insisted on continuing, things began to happen at Big Booky. Foremost was the fact that the books had almost disappeared. They had slowly slipped and crept and cringed to the back of the store, and there they stayed like a dirty secret. This was ironic, because it was Big Booky that had driven all the neighborhood book stores out of business, like the snakes out of Ireland. Now Big Booky was a gift store, high-end gifts, the kind she couldn't afford, though she did once buy a tiny box of chocolates for a friend that cost $12.99.

When the famine broke and she wrote the book and she sent the queries and she walked the miles, and when hope was nearly extinguished, there came that word that every writer thirsts for: 

YES





A yes, by God, a Yes, and her third book, her novel that she had yearned into being, was actually going to become real.

But it had been ten years since her first novel, and suddenly she realized that she and her work were perceived as Paleozoic. Never mind the  rapturous reviews, the "fiction at its finest", the triumphant readings and signings in venues she had only dreamed about before. There was a sense that having a third book out, after everything had changed so much, was like having a baby when you were fifty: it was inappropriate to feel any pride in it at all.

She picked up with her prickly little antennae that she was so unhip as to be an embarrassment, someone you'd want to hide in the back of the store along with all the books. For if book stores now buried their own merchandise as if it was just too uncool to show, what chance did an author have, an old author who didn't know how to move and shake and get down on her knees in front of the necessary men?







The launch! Where was she going to arrange the launch? It was an exercise in humiliation to even consider having it at Big Booky, where the other two events had gone so well. Nevertheless, inured to the endless humiliations authors had to endure as the price of daring to write, and in full knowledge of the fact that it was now the only book store that existed, she went in to talk to them. 

The events planner didn't come out from wherever she was hiding because she was "busy", so they palmed her off onto someone who wanted to do it even less than she did. The young man she spoke to wouldn't make eye contact. His voice was monotone. He did not say hello. When she mentioned she had had her first two launches with them, he took the copies of the novels from her without looking at them and disappeared.





When he returned, he said, "These didn't show up in the computer." Did he even believe the store had sold them and (she thought) proudly launched a local author? (Twice?) Then he fired a series of questions at her, not about the book (in which he displayed no interest at all), but what her social media contacts were, and whether she had contacted head office about whether or not they were going to carry the book. 

She wasn't stupid, she knew this was crucial, but why was it so front-loaded, why such indifference to her passion? But passion was a liability now. And since when did authors have to arrange for mega-corporations to carry their small-box novels? Wasn't this just another opportunity for humiliation and shame?

It was her least proficient area, and she knew her publisher should have been taking care of it, but she was expected to rhyme off all the jargon, though at one point she wondered if he were selling widgets or McDonald's hamburgers rather than pieces of literature. He did not engage with her, didn't smile and attempted no human connection whatsoever, but it was obvious that SHE had failed, that it had been a grave mistake to tell him about the other two novels, that they were a black mark on her record. 

He told her they were booked up for the next three months and did not give her any followup information. Before she left, he pressed a card into her hand with his name and title: Customer Experience Manager. Just to shock him, she shook his hand, and his dulled face briefly registered a look of astonishment.





It was happening again. She was trying, too hard, running back and forth as she had always done.  He was sleepwalking in a high-end gift shop that no longer even pretended to take an interest in "local writers": they were a joke now, they didn't move enough copies, and who would ever come out to see them? Big Booky had gone the way of Big Pharma and Big Burger and Big Everything Else. She had never felt so irrelevant. After all that toiling and despair, and the tenuous and almost bizarre rebirth, she realized her book was an orphan in the storm, that no one welcomed it, that no one gave a crap about whether anyone ever read it at all. 



Monday, March 3, 2014

Rob Ford on Jimmy Kimmel: pounding 'em back




Rob Ford sneaks a quick one on Jimmy Kimmel. Ford was so intoxicated that he didn't even realize he was being eviscerated in front of millions of people. All Kimmel had to do was show the video evidence of Ford falling down, swearing in Jamaican, uttering death threats and knocking down old ladies to have the audience in horrified stitches. Meanwhile RoFo believed the jeering laughter was a sign of admiration and even adulation of his greatness. Did Kimmel genuinely dislike Rob Ford? I think so. I think he thinks he's a scuzzbag, and he'd be right. But it's too bad we have to resort to showing videos of  drug-abusing sociopathic pricks to get a laugh.


Ten Signs that you're Harold Lloyd



Ten signs that you’re Harold Lloyd




You can’t do a thing with your hair.




Your glasses have no glass in them.




You see everything in black and white.




You have a compulsive need to dangle from clocks.




When you talk no sound comes out.




Heights make you dizzy.




You're often left holding the crank.




No matter how much trouble you're in, you're always polite.





You often hear the phrase, ‘How did he do that?”.




You always get the girl.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

My hero bares his nerves: hopelessness and hope in the writing life





When I renamed my blog after Harold's professional moniker, I made a vow to myself that I would not write "essays", that in fact I would write whatever-the-fuck I wanted to, always, because at the time it was all I had. So here lies a bunch of thoughts, along with a sinking, fainting hope, a glimpse of a deer; no, not a doe but a buck, magnificently muscled about the neck, which I feverishly pursue even in full knowledge of the spiked collar around his neck which proclaims, pursue me not, nor touch me; I belong to everyone, but not to you.

So. Lately on Facebook, which I have mixed feelings about, I've seen a few posts that speak to me, whether for good or ill. One particularly poignant piece was about a young woman, a university student, who experiences chronic low-grade depression which sometimes becomes disabling under academic pressure. Not one health-related agency in the school would help her, in fact they all looked either puzzled or embarrassed when she asked who she should approach, or just shrugged her off with "I don't know" (perhaps the worst of all, as if she was the only person in the world who had been diagnosed with some mysterious and untreatable disease).





What's that about? Is no one allowed to be damaged, to need surcease? Are we all supposed to be constantly stoking ourselves for the feverish race, the incessant jockeying for position (nowhere more in evidence than in academia)?  Or are people just craven in their inability to risk compassion?

I saw another post which frankly ravaged me, a poem I've quoted here several times:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

I know about that feverish chase, for it has occupied a huge chunk of my life to date. In writing a novel about the incredible life and career of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, I became enraptured, even inhabited. I felt I not only knew him, but was with him. (If that sounds totally nuts, I hope you'll at least read the book to find out for yourself.) And yet, there was always some aspect of him that was elusive, even unknowable.




Fainting, I rushed through the bracken, falling and getting up again, sometimes catching just a glimpse of the impossibly fleet deer with the glancing diamonds about its neck. Thomas Wyatt in his insane passion for the doomed Anne Boleyn knew of this, I am sure of it. The drivenness, the hopelessness, the failure that just stokes the fires of pursuit. 

Well, why not do something else, then? I realize with no small measure of horror that I'm really not much good at anything else. I have spent my entire life pursuing something that would appear to be doomed. Thus the Wyatt poem doesn't just speak to me: it screams in my ear, run. . . RUN!





And yet, and yet. I am still filled with a fizzy excitement about this book. I can't help myself. it relit the flame for me when I was sure I would never write a novel again, or at least one that I felt I could send out and sell. Blogging was a consolation, and, for a while, my longstanding gig as a book reviewer, until even that outlet dried up in the wake of nearly-nonexistent books sections filled with "canned" reviews. But surely I would never again allow the heartbreak of full-length fiction to take over my life. 

On Facebook I read of professional magazine writers who can no longer write for magazines, and I see why. I don't buy or read them except in my dentist's waiting room, but when I do, I keep searching for content and find virtually none, just the glossy flab of more, and more, and more ads. The actual magazine starts some 50 pages in, if it starts at all. Someone has deemed that readers want a brief chunked-up Facebook-type read, skip, skip, skip. I know I should not be so contemptuous of this, because the truth is I do it myself.




According to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook is a different Facebook for everyone who is "on" it, things are pretty bad in literary-land, even in the once-comforting groves of Academe where you are no longer allowed to express your pain (perhaps part of the happy-face syndrome of social media). It's a crap shoot, though (more crap than shoot), and as people incessantly tell me, it has always been that way. A line from Dylan Thomas insanely jumps into my head: "My hero bares his nerves along my wrist". What does it mean? Jesus on the cross? Heroin abuse? Sex? Death? The Colossus that was toppled or washed away in a tide of booze? Thomas had every advantage a poet could have, was lionized and widely published and even (gasp) appreciated, and yet, like too many poets before/after him, the result of his "success" was that he went broke and died.

When I am in this turquoise/cobalt state I listen to too much Shostakovich, and as is normal for abnormal me, I fixate on one work and play it to death. Lately it has been the towering Fifth Symphony: not just any version, but the revered Bernstein interpretation from the 1960s. My hero bares his nerves, indeed. Bares his ache. I'm not sure what Shostakovich was like, though I remember reading that a great deal of his music was written for Mother Russia. Perhaps that even explains the triumphant ending of the searing, almost-unbearably dysphoric Fifth. OK, let's go major here, because really, we don't have any choice.




And the rest of the time he wrote movie music, which was probably kick-ass, and there's nothing wrong with that because 95% of movie scores are dreck. But he was keeping body and soul together, was he not? Nothing wrong with that. Or so it seems. We have no record of what he thought about it.

And as for Bernstein, once a magnificent bubble of brilliant ego, he deteriorated with the years, and NOT because after years of hiding he decided to come out of the closet. He deteriorated because, like Dylan Thomas, he drowned in alcohol, falling off the podium and propositioning young men at random.




Harold Lloyd didn't sell out, or at least I don't think he did. But in spite of the fact that he certainly didn't need the money, he made one last grab at a comeback in a strange film called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.  This was shot in the early 1940s, and if Harold's "boy" of the 1920s was dated with the advent of sound, he was downright archaic in the '40s, when Tracy and Hepburn were working themselves into a comic fever. It's not that he didn't look good - he did - but in a sense, he was a 50-year-old boy, a man trapped in amber and stopped in time whose career and love life had not advanced in more than 20 years.

I didn't like this film, nor did the public, but what ruined it wasn't just Harold's legendary clash with the smart and snappy director Preston Sturges (who is named Sterling Prescott in my novel). It was the opening, in which for the first time we see the Glass Character deeply depressed. I still can't watch it: Lloyd is a subtle, mercurial and often brilliant actor, which is the key to his comic genius, and when he plays depressed, it's depressed. It's painful. We don't want to see the Boy that way. The picture was supposed to be a continuation of The Freshman, but since when was the Freshman supposed to turn out like this?




He chased after a successful comeback, and ran and grabbed, and for all his phenomenal determination, he didn't win, the prize slipped through his fingers. To his credit, he did NOT drown himself in alcohol or otherwise go insane, but turned his formidable energies to other things, positive, life-affirming things,  including philanthropy.

Is there a lesson? I am no good at lessons, or I wouldn't write at all. I simply have to do this, though I still don't know what "this" will mean. It took me three years of pain to find a home for Harold, I was beginning to lose all hope, and now this, another chance! I'd rather feel the pain of success (with all its attendant horrors) than the existential funk of failure, scrambling around to find meaning in it all.





My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal ruler,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.
 
And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.
 
My hero bares my side and sees his heart
Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heat.
 
He holds the wire from the box of nerves
Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.



"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Thursday, February 27, 2014

The kind of review you. . . somehow. . . just don't wanna get




I don't know how I end up on these things, but here it is - first of all, an Amazon.com review of one of Elizabeth Wurtzel's self-serving, self-involved pieces of tripe, then another, then another. . . and me wondering how a review could possibly be any worse, when I happen to know the author earns enough to put herself through law school in an extremely happy and floaty state.

It's a racket, this writing business. I think I'll go home now.

19 of 27 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars The WORST Book I've Ever Read...Seriously., February 13, 2005
This review is from: The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman (Paperback)
While I pretty much liked Prozac Nation, Bitch, and More, Now & Again, this book was completely horrible. Everything about it is cliched. The writing is bad and trite and the advice is really just irritating. The advice is far from radical as well. If I flushed my money down the toilet it would have been better spent. If you are an uncommon woman and you want some commonsense advice, I would say don't spend your money on this trash. I think the only reason I read the whole book was because I couldn't believe how horrible it was. I'm personally offended that so many books don't get published, but this one did. What a waste.



1.0 out of 5 stars simply awful, Dec 21 2001
By A Customer
Self-serving platitude heaped on self-serving platitude then served up as "sass," from a spoiled, self-involved non-entity. Watch and enjoy as she, along with every other nineties excess, swirls into a well-deserved oblivion. Simply an awful --I hesitate to say "writer" --simply an awful phenomenon. Whoever mistook her for a role model deserves what they got. Another non-book from a talentless brat.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars So is this "Radical Sanity" repackaged?, August 11, 2007
By 
N. Charest (Rancho Cucamonga, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for the Uncommon Woman (Paperback)
If so, then URP and shame on everyone for dragging out EW's least imaginative and most poorly written and confusing book and trying to pass it off as a new title. I know law school is expensive, but do what everyone else does and take out student loans. Wurtzel, you've snorted law school tuition 3 or four times over. Get a real job.
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