Thursday, May 15, 2014

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 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Happy Mother's Day







It was a long, long time ago, I was an overwhelmed young Mom (just a baby myself), and I'd just had my second child. We lived 900 miles away from all our relatives. Though Bill did everything he could, he worked long hours and just couldn't... be there when I needed him. And the new baby screamed and screamed, and I didn't sleep. . .




And then my mother-in-law called and said she was coming out to help. I was too dizzy with fatigue to say yes or no. When she arrived, she said, "you look after the baby, and I'll do everything else." And she did, from spending time with dazed little Jeffy (only18 months old and a little traumatized at having a new sibling) to making meals to keeping the place clean to baking a cake. This was intensive homemaking and grandmothering, and though I am sure I did not fully appreciate what she was doing, it was lifesaving.






But it was the way she did it - with such joy - bouncing Shannon around to relieve her colic, sitting on the floor playing with Jeffy, taking him outside to play in the snow - that I marvel at now. And it hit me with an absolute shock today that she was probably younger than I am now. She became my Mum over the years, filling an awful gap left by an indifferent mother (my name did not appear in her obituary), and what I marvel at most is her sense of gratitude for everything she had. This was rarely spelled out, because it didn't have to be. Her passing was as graceful and as gracious as she was. I will remember her every day of my life.
 




This is why Jake should play Harold. . .




I've got to go to bed, it's very very late, and this old blog is getting out of hand.

My blog is an anachronism. Looks like a piece of old brown paper. Everyone else is going all slick. Picturesque, even. Mine is butcher paper tied with string. OK.

This is why Jake should play Harold.

At first glance you'd think not. WHAT? People mention Johnny Depp, who's 50, and even Tom Hanks who must be 60 by now.

Jakey is 33, just ripe enough. The shape of his head is perfect. He has a long, clean, handsome jaw, a long narrow nose and bow-shaped lips.

Heartbreaking blue eyes. Little-boy eyes. The eyebrows.

A big head on fairly small shoulders, compact body, wiry, restless, intense. A three-cornered, vulpine smile.

A sense that anything could happen, and is about to. A sense of a storm breaking out, of rain in the air, of horses whinnying along the ridge while clouds go scudding by.

And he's a good-smelling man, I know he is. And I know Harold was. I just know.

That's why he should play Harold.




Saturday, May 10, 2014

Don't give your heart





You must know this: it's not too goddamn smart
To give your heart.




To let some boy just trifle, a-la-carte
It's not too smart.




If you want to go there, go there,
And if you want to stay here, stay here,
And if you want to just pop la balloon
With la railroad-spike -
Do what you like.





Stupid to throw so much of yourself away
Stupid to realize it's past that day
(Way past that day!)
But haven't we always been the railroad type?





Love is a gutting kind of a thing
Doesn't make bells and banjos ring
and in the end, who's gonna sing? 
(Say, sing!)





When it almost works, it's such a shame,
And shame can feel much worse than pain
(and wedding rain)

When it almost works, the shock is deep
When it almost works, it shatters sleep
And pride and other things





The dream is stolen in the night
But you left it in the open, that wasn't too bright!
Not too bright.





When magic misfires too many times
and when all this stuff no longer rhymes:
Quelle horreur!

But it can't be worse than misfired art
And it can't be worse than knowing
You made this whole mess start -

You gave your heart.


Duckie-wuckies up the stairs!


Thursday, May 8, 2014

Goosey goosey gosling




To their surprise and delight, Caitlin and Ryan discovered a family of geese outside their condo in Palm Springs.




Fuzzy widdle goslings. . . ahhhhhh. . . 




Palm Springs. Holiday. No, we're not there. . . 




But it might be nice (if we had the $$). . .




 This isn't a selfie, so what should we call it: a footie?


Wednesday, May 7, 2014

James Cagney and other cool cats




I promised you gifs, and here they are. It's a treat to watch Cagney dance like a cat, in a sinuous manner that is nevertheless always intensely masculine. Nobody else had a style even remotely like his, lending itself naturally to alley-cat leaps and predatory slinks. I see traces of his carnivorous style in Gene Kelly, who purposely seemed to take a step away from the elegance of Fred Astaire. Instead of whirling his gorgeously-gowned girl in the air, he'd lift her up by the inner thigh and let her slide down his body. (Gifs to follow. I promise.)




Ruby Keeler was always the star of these extravaganzas. It's strange, because she isn't nearly as beautiful as some of the other dancers - she's more sweet or cute than beautiful, like the girl you'd take to the drive-in (if they had them back then). She couldn't act, and her singing voice was pretty awful. But she could dance. And there was something about the way she inhabited her body, some indefinable quality. (Or maybe Busby was banging her, who knows.)




I love the choreography in the early musicals - it's about as hokey as it gets. How I wish I still had my YouTube video of Broadway Melody, the first big all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza of 1929. There was a luscious number in it called Wedding of the Painted Doll, and if I had it now I'd gif it to death.




Meow-meow-meow, chow-chow-chow. . . 




Classic Busby Berkeley. Imagine smiling like that for 17 takes.



Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Just sittin' on a back yard fence (meow)




Though I wasn't able to find the whole thing, this is a substantial chunk of my favorite number from Footlight Parade, the quirky Busby Berkeley musical I watched for the second time last night. Though the movie runs the gamut from water ballet to gangster drama to pre-code titillation, this is the one I love because it's so damn quirky, and Ruby Keeler looks adorable in a fluffy tail.

I PROMISE I will make gifs of this. The only reason I am not making gifs of this right now is the fact that Gifsforum isn't working - it's "down" - and as usual, Y2GIF is WAY down, permanently it seems, though it used to be the one I liked to use.

This is, by the way, a Spanish version, a strange thing sung by men that has little or nothing to do with the original music. And don't ask me why Ruby dances around on a big face. I'm not sure if it's the moon or what.



Oh, and - in other news - today I walked into Chapters, where I was afraid my book would never be sold, and went through the d's, the e's, the f''s. . . ga, ge, gi. . .gr (lots of gr's) - then (angel chorus) - there he was on a high shelf: HAROLD!! It was an incredible feeling to see that book (or books, 3 whole copies) up there, for the first time in 9 years. I had thought I would never write seriously again, and certainly never publish again. So no matter what happens from now on, we have crossed some kind of threshhold, Harold and I.

The Glass Character will be sold in eight Chapters stores in Vancouver and area, and though that may be the extent of my exposure there, it's better than the nothing I had before. My other two experiences with publication taught me to cherish the sweet moments, someone coming up to make a comment to you in the drug store, seeing the book on a "local authors" shelf, being invited to speak at a book club where you used to be a member - just things you dreamed about, in your hand for one fleeting moment.



Rob Ford calls rehab ‘amazing’, promises to return to election: report
Ford says he is enjoying rehab, is on the mend, and will be back for the election.
Rob Ford announced last Wednesday  that he would be checking into a rehab facility.


FRANK GUNN / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Rob Ford announced last Wednesday that he would be checking into a rehab facility.

By: Sean Wetselaar Staff Reporter, Published on Wed May 07 2014

Mayor Rob Ford’s exact whereabouts are still unknown, but according to a media report, he is enjoying his time in rehab.

“I feel great,” he told Joe Warmington, a columnist for the Toronto Sun. “Rehab is amazing. It reminds me of football camp. Kind of like the Washington Redskins camp I went to as a kid.”

Ford announced last Wednesday evening that he would be stepping down from his campaign and checking into a rehab facility to deal with substance abuse issues — though his statement focused primarily on alcohol use.



Though Ford would not lay down an exact timeline on his return, he was adamant that he will return in time for elections on October 28.

On Tuesday, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong confirmed Ford is in rehab, but refused to say where he was.

“Councillor Ford passed me the phone because Rob wanted to speak to me,” Minnan-Wong told reporters

“He said that he was in rehab, he was working out. He asked how things were going at council.”

On Tuesday, The Globe and Mail reported that Ford voluntarily turned back from the United States after landing in Chicago, before he could be denied entry.




Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a supporter of the mayor on council, also chimed in Tuesday, telling reporters people deserve to know where Ford is receiving treatment so it can be verified.

“I think that, based on the mayor’s behaviour over the last number of years, because of the amount of opportunity he’s had to come forward and tell the truth and hasn’t on different issues. I would say to you right now that at the very least the city should know the city that he’s in for treatment, and with some verification that he is in fact being treated. And then I’d ask everybody to just leave him alone and let him be treated,” Mammoliti said at city hall during a break in Tuesday’s council meeting.

So far, the name and location of his rehab facility is unknown.

Council will resume at City Hall Wednesday at 9:30 a.m., without the mayor.



I just don't know where to start here. I might as well grab a random thought: addicts lie. It's what they do. Ford has been lying to the nation and to his constituents for years now, and in particular he has been lying to us about his addiction(s), consistently denying flagrant abuse of crack cocaine in public places. So why are people so easily duped? He's "in rehab" now (or so we are told). So doesn't that mean he's getting better?

If Ford is indeed in rehab, it sounds more like a luxury resort to me. If you're in real recovery, you don't feel "great". You usually feel totally wretched, either experiencing the horrendous effects of physical withdrawal or beginning to realize how your addiction has laid waste to your life and your loved ones. This isn't happening, folks, because RoFo is a shallow bastard with no capacity for real insight and self-reflection. He has never had ANY negative consequences for his appalling behaviour, and may even win the next election, not in spite of but because of it.



Ford will say whatever will get him out of trouble and/or call attention to himself. He's playing the rehab card to gain sympathy, and the appalling thing is, IT'S WORKING. He's a slimy slug of a man, repellent in every way, and the people forgive him over and over again, seemingly not caring that he has made a laughingstock of himself and of his entire country, fodder for late-night comedians and editorialists everywhere. This has gone global, folks, and his next escapade - leaving "rehab" early because he "feels so great" that his counsellors have said he can go - will only gain him more attention, the thing he thrives on. Fire up the crack pipe, Dougie - he's heading home.