GOD! It took me a long time to find this. It's a song I remember from childhood, when we owned every album Burl Ives ever made. I kind of underestimated him, I think - I thought he was just this bulky, dorky folk singer who sang kiddie songs and once in a while showed up in a movie. But this song, which I hadn't heard in - God! I hate to say, perhaps 50 years - stuck in my head. It was about a man who had been executed for a double murder and thus was singing to us, not from Heaven Above, but that other place.
YouTube just burgeons constantly, a never-ending joy and source of fascination for me, but I sure had to wait a long time for this. Ives was a unique singer with an extremely subtle and expressive tenor voice. He "undersang" rather than belted, didn't even project very much at all because he had a sort of silvery quality, like moonlight. Even though we get to experience the horror of the electric chair directly ("they turned on the juice. . . "), he sings almost tenderly, and without a trace of anger or self-pity.
It's a damn good arrangement, and I love the smokily subtle chorus, though there are other versions such as this one (which I posted a couple of years ago) that take a slightly different approach. I don't know who Cowboy Copas is, or was, because I loathe country music more than anything. But some artists transcend genre, and this version is compelling in its own way.
Or is it the fact that I'm just bloody morbid? I've always had a fascination with death and the macabre. Death-in-life. I have seen friends of mine drop off the planet one by one, and I wonder where they go. People younger than me, I mean, and some of them even healthy, seemingly destined to live another 30 years. And then -
For many years, I was adamantly against the death penalty. We don't have it in Canada, and I am just as glad, but there are cases, particularly child murder - let's just say my views have changed, at least under particularly horrendous circumstances. People are more likely to murder their families, the people they "love" the most, than anyone else. It stretches our capacity to believe that human nature can really be that dark.
Man imprisoned for being gay to get posthumous pardon from Trudeau
'It’s great that the young Trudeau is finishing the work that his father started,' lawyer says.
CBC News Posted: Feb 28, 2016 4:06 PM ET Last Updated: Feb 28, 2016 8:25 PM ET
The Klippert case stoked considerable media and political interest in Canada and prompted the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau to introduce a bill in 1967 that, among other things, called for the decriminalization of private, consensual homosexual acts between people over the age of 21.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intends to posthumously pardon Everett George Klippert who, because he admitted to police in the 1960s that he was gay, was deemed a dangerous sexual offender and sent to prison.
"The prime minister intends to recommend that a pardon under the authority of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy be granted posthumously to Mr. Klippert," Trudeau's office said in a media release.
The move was cheered Sunday by gay-rights advocates.
"It's fantastic that he'll get a posthumous pardon," lawyer Doug Elliott told CBC News.
As well, the statement said the Liberal government will also look to see whether pardons are "warranted" after reviewing the cases of other individuals who in the past were convicted on charges such as gross indecency and buggery.
"As Canadians, we know that protecting and promoting fundamental human rights must be an imperative for governments and individuals alike, and this includes gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation," the weekend statement said.
Trudeau's office credited Klippert's case for being "instrumental" in Canada's decision to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults.
Indefinite prison sentence
Klippert was questioned by the RCMP in 1965 during an arson investigation in Pine Point, N.W.T. He wasn't involved in the fire, but voluntarily said he'd had sexual relations with four men. He was charged with four counts of gross indecency, all for consensual, private, non-violent acts.
In 1966, Klippert was visited in prison by a Crown-appointed psychiatrist who concluded that Klippert's homosexuality was "incurable," and that he therefore met the criteria regarding dangerous sexual offenders.
A judge agreed and sentenced Klippert to preventive detention, meaning an indefinite term in prison.
The sentence was backed up by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1967, although Chief Justice John Cartwright suggested the laws regarding homosexuality be clarified, and that incarceration of harmless homosexuals was not their intention.
The Klippert case stoked considerable media and political interest. Just six weeks later, Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal government's justice minister (who would later become prime minister) introduced a bill that, among other things, called for the decriminalization of private, consensual homosexual acts between people over the age of 21.
"It's great that the young Trudeau is finishing the work that his father started," Elliott said.
Before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, people were routinely charged with gross indecency — a charge almost always applied to homosexuals — but rarely for private, consensual acts.
Klippert was released from prison on July 21, 1971. He was 69 when he died in in 1996.
"I never understood: Why didn't Pierre Trudeau let him out in 1969 when they decriminalized gay sex?" Elliott said. "They kept the poor guy who was responsible for shining a light on this issue in jail for another couple of years."
Last week, the prime minister confirmed he will march in Toronto's Pride parade on July 3, a move that would make history with Trudeau being the first sitting PM in Canada to take part in the event.
BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. So why this? Why now? When I saw this article, I groaned - groaned that anyone was ever imprisoned for consensual sex of any kind. Consenting adults in private - isn't that the deal? Shouldn't that have been the deal even then? I guess not.
I also groaned at the word "pardon". It means "forgiveness of wrongdoing", which isn't exactly what we're after here, is it? It's like saying "I forgive you" to someone who hasn't done anything. It doesn't go down too well with me. I've been "forgiven" for shit THEY did to ME.
But the worst were the comments: 84 of them, and nearly all of them extremely negative, vilifying Justin Trudeau for wasting taxpayers'dollars/our precious time. Of those who commented, practically no one showed any sensitivity at all for the plight of this man and the countless others who did serious time because of their sexual orientation. The vast majority believed it was an irrelevant issue that belonged in the musty vaults of the past.
I think it's time i stopped reading , watching and listening to the news . the lunacy of our current and recent governments is just getting too much for me .
This Guy wont stop anywhere to scrape out an extra vote. .What has happened happened you cant turn back time but the Liberals think all you have to do is throw taxpayer money at any situation..
Nothing more important to d than pardoning dead people? This is like the ministry of truth in 1984 rewriting history.
Oh for God's sake please don't ! . Do we not have enough problems here in Canada to deal with now as it is ?? with out having to go digging up old dead skeletons ?? next thing you'll hear is how some folks are going to be demanding "compensation" for being wrongly convicted decades ago. This will only lead to further strain on our already collapsing economy .
This is what our Prime Minister is focusing on?
The insanity continues... How about dealing with what is happening in Canada now?
I cannot believe he has to delve into the past when seniors are close to eating dog food and they are throwing $1700 a month to each member of a Syrian family stuffed into a hotel room in Toronto. JT please .....
Why do the important business of the nation when you can do stuff like this.
That figures. No surprises there.
My dismay at this story just grows: as was usually done back then, this guy was "examined" and deemed "incurable" by a psychiatrist. So what is that supposed to mean? It shook loose some pretty disturbing memories: all sorts of shit came pouring back into my mind. I used to read a great deal of crap - now I have no idea why, though most of it fell under the guise of "self-help". I guess I thought these "experts" knew better than I did about how to live my life.
One of my favorite psycho-babblers was one Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, one of those New York psychoanalytic types who got into writing simplistic bestsellers like The Angry Book and The Thin Book by a Formerly Fat Psychiatrist. Everything was pathologized in his books, including anything sexual that didn't fit within the bounds of holy matrimony, in the missionary position, not more than once or twice a month.
Here is one of his pronouncements on homosexuality:
“Homosexuality is a symptom of emotional disturbance. Emotional disturbance can be remedied and the homosexual can become heterosexual, but the psychotherapeutic process is long and quite often painful… This means in effect, changing the relating habits of a lifetime—no easy matter. Few homosexual people have the extraordinary motivation required to take on this great effort—but some do and are successful.” (Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, The Winner’s Notebook, New York: Pocket Books, 1969, p. 53)
Just the fact that this is in a book called The Winner's Notebook (and I - gasp, gulp - remember reading it and in fact might still have a copy floating around) takes a distancing, poking-with-a-sharp-stick approach to "homosexuality", as if to say, "We know none of this applies to us, because we're Winners. But not everyone is in that category. Some of these people are so emotionally fucked-up that they can't even make themselves straight, the way they could and would if they were motivated and really tried."
This book came out in that pivotal year, 1969, when Pierre Trudeau, father of our current Prime Minister, decriminalized gay sex with the famous statement, "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But it took another two years for Everett Klippert to be set free, and no doubt he carried a criminal record, not to mention deep emotional scars, for the rest of his life.
Anthony Perkins, best-known for the Hitchcock thriller Psycho, was a fine and sensitive actor/human being who was forever questing for truth. He also strove personfully to give up his own natural orientation in order to get married and have kids: in other words, to make himself straight. But in this impossible goal he was influenced hugely by his analyst, Mildred Newman, the author of the famous/ infamous 1970s bestseller, How to Be Your Own Best Friend.
“Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.”
Though Tony was widely viewed as one of Newman's "success stories", mainly because he had a long-suffering wife and managed to stay married, he died of AIDS in 1992, weighed down with guilt and shame that he had not been able to live up to the pressure to "go straight".
If a man had consensual sex with a man (for women didn't seem to be included in the equation), it was a criminal act, and it stayed that way for a very long time. People went to jail for it the same way they would for child sexual abuse. But thanks to "experts" like Rubin and Newman, homosexuality was converted from a crime into a serious mental illness, a pathology. For this, these therapists were viewed as compassionate humanitarians deserving of praise, if not awards. The underlying agenda was that you had to act straight, no matter how you really felt. Stay married. Keep it hidden. This is where the expression "in the closet" originated.
There might have been a time in my life that I didn't "get" all this. And I will never get it the way someone who has lived through it would. But things are different, there has been a shift. I had very mixed feelings about this pardon, because as far as I am concerned the man did nothing wrong. How do you pardon something that isn't a crime? The reasoning is, it was a crime THEN and so it needs to be pardoned retroactively. This is sad, but not as sad as all those ranty ugly comments, the dozens and scores and even hundreds of them, from people who seemed to feel we were wasting our time on all this stuff and should just forget about it. Because the guy is dead, or because it's a "gay issue", it isn't worth the public's concern.
It's the same attitude that says, those aboriginal people should just get on with it! This is 2016, they can't have a pow-wow and try to get all that land back, because it belongs to US now. It's just a waste of taxpayers' dollars. As a relative of mine likes to say, "Awww, why not just shoot 'em."
Our culture does not understand reparation. It doesn't. It barely understands any sort of attitudinal shift and why it needs to happen. There are a great many people keeping their mouths shut because they don't have the courage to come out with what they really believe. Instead, they slap ugliness all over the newspaper comments section UNDER ALIASES, saving themselves any sort of repercussion. It's the most cowardly act I can think of for a writer not to sign a piece of their work.
Back in the Stone Age when I wrote for newspapers (and I spent 25 or 30 years doing so and wrote literally thousands of columns and reviews), the paper phoned me if I wrote a letter to the editor to verify my identity. I had to provide my phone number and full address if my letter was even to be considered for publication. Now the most toxic spews appear under full protection of anonymity, so that people can savage the article, the editor, the paper itself, and all the other people submitting comments, not to mention all those politically-correct types who keep wasting our time and money. So long as the comment isn't "defamatory" (and by whose standards, I do not know), it gets posted. This is considered a "valuable public forum" and a place for people to air their grievances and express their disagreements. That's the worst pile of shit I have heard of in my life.
So hatred has a new place to hide. This crap never gets solved or healed, never goes away - just goes underground. This makes reading/watching the news so depressing that I am increasingly avoiding it. It's grim, oppressive and does not do anyone any good, and it does not improve my increasingly low opinion of the human race.
I like to think that being happy is an act of resistance - one I must work on daily to avoid a tidal wave of soul-destroying depression. And I don't always make it. But I will be damned if I will let these bastards take from me the things and the people I hold most dear. I won't let them have my compassion, or my intelligence, or my joy. But my God, I wish sometimes that it wasn't such an interminable and exhausting battle.
After a two-year old tragically shot his mother using her legally concealed weapon, the NRA have insisted such tragedies could be prevented if all two-year olds were given their own guns.
The incident took place in Idaho in the US, where children are forced to wait until their 8th or 9th birthday before being given a gun of their own.
The NRA have been quick to offer a solution to such tragic incidents, insisting there is only one way to prevent them in future.
NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre explained, “It might have been an accident, but would this toddler have reached into his mother’s bag for a gun if he had already been holding his own gun? Almost certainly not.”
“If the toddler had pointed his own gun at his mother, she would still have had her own gun at hand and would have been able to defend herself, saving an American life right there.”
“Some in the liberal media would say targeting a small handgun called ‘My First handgun’ at children as young as two is dangerous, but I would say the only danger is not targeting them younger.”
“Once again a disarmed American is killed in an incident that could have been prevented had there been more guns available.”
NRA shooting solution
Idaho residents have called the dangerous lack of guns in their young child’s livesan ‘accident waiting to happen’, whilst gun manufacturers have announced a new toddler line being added to their range this summer.
Gun salesman Chuck Williams told us, “You know, ‘My First Handgun’ is great product for the first grader, but it’s too big and bulky for your average kindergarten attendee.”
“We’re working on a new design that comes in baby pink that fits nicely in the palm of your average baby.”
“You don’t even need to be able to walk in order to be able to use it.”
“God bless America!”
BLOGGER'S NOTE. This is yet another example of my stealing an article, but it's too important not to steal, satire or not. Hey, I'm a Canadian and have neither seen nor heard a gun in my entire life. The only person I have ever known who owned guns had an antique rifle collection, and he never fired them. Maybe the majority of Americans are the same. Aren't they? God, how I hope so.
I watched an old Dateline last night in which one man shot another in a Walgreen's parking lot, because he found out the guy was diddling his wife. When he explained the whole thing to police, he said something like, "No, I never meant to shoot anyone. I saw this guy coming for me so I pulled out my gun, and then he pulled out HIS gun. . . "
Like pulling out "my wallet", or "my keys". "My gun". "His gun." The thing I carry around with me all the time. . . for self-defense, of course.
Because this guy was carrying around His Gun as a regular accessory, he had a deadly weapon instantly at hand, so his rival lay dead a couple of seconds later. If neither of these guys had been armed - if they had been dumb old Canadians meeting in a Tim Hortons parking lot to have it out over a love triangle - this deadly incident would have amounted to a whole lot of sweater-pulling and missed head-punches, like in an NHL game where the blows don't connect because of the ice. (Come to that, there probably WOULD be ice.)
We're not "better", but this attitude of arming everyone to "stop gun violence" - I've never heard of it around here. Ever. We feel sadness about all this, along with a lot of distaste. And fear. We fear being swallowed up, as we always have.
Canadians are often denigrated and our nation labelled third-rate. But look at the dynamics here. Canada is almost 100 years younger than the United States. Where was the States in 1876? Not exactly where they are now, at least in cultural sophistication. Canada's population is roughly 1/10 of the States - you heard that right, it's 10%, spread over a much wider geographical area, with a limited number of concentrated areas of population. It's a different setup altogether. Our history is vastly different, and vastly boring, with virtually no bloodshed, at least not among civilians. One of our greatest writers, Robertson Davies, was famously quoted as saying, "Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution". Not wishing to fight, these Loyalists and crazy Quakerish types just pulled up stakes and left. Headed North, like a lot of people do.
Thus, celebrities are already planning their escape to Canada if Trump becomes President. It could happen. Escaped slaves from the American South found safe haven in Canada (though I never learned my own city was a hub of such sanctuary until years and years later: the school system seemed to think there was something shameful about it). And what about the draft dodgers? I know people who are still living here who escaped the draft in the 1960s. "Hey-hey-hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"
We're culturally different, and though (of course) there is violence, there are gangs (who get their hands on guns no matter what), murders, and so on, people are more apt to use clumsy methods like knives and clubs. Not exactly civilized, but a bullet is a bullet: when aimed just right, it is instantaneous death.
Don't arm the kids. Don't arm the men, or the women. Put down your weapons, beat your swords into ploughshares. Listen to us before it's too late. Dorky, powerless, boring old Canada, the nation without an ego, might just be on to something after all.
POST-BLOG REVELATIONS: Yes, there IS violence in Canada! But this is all I could find, one short article that was repeated over and over again. Somehow, "fighting for his life" had morphed into "serious but stable condition" by the end of the article. As far as I know, both men were OK, eh?, but boy were they pissed at each other until the cops got them to make up, and one guy bought the other guy a "donut" and a double-double.
KINGSTON, Ont. — One man is charged with attempted murder and another is fighting for his life in hospital after an early morning knife fight at a Tim Hortons on Tuesday.
Police were called to the coffee shop just after 5 a.m.
They arrested a 30-year-man near the scene with a slew of charges, including attempted murder, weapons dangerous and two counts of breach of weapons prohibition order.
The 39-year-old man taken to hospital with stab wounds is in serious but stable condition, police said.
Police have not released names or what they thought was behind the early-morning coffee shop brawl.
BONUS STORY! No guns in this story at all! (Promise!)
JIM MOODIE, QMI AGENCY
May 22, 2014, Last Updated: 3:06 PM ET
It's the kind of story as Canadian as maple syrup - a northern Ontario man found a two-day-old baby moose on the side of the highway, picked it up and took it to Tim Hortons.
"She still had the umbilical cord and was still wet when I found her," Stephan Michel Desgroseillers of Copper Cliff, Ont., told Shirley Erkila, who posted a video of her petting the calf outside the coffee shop near Sudbury, Ont., on Monday.
"The wolves would have got to her," Desgroseillers said.
In a posting on the radio station Q92 Rocks Facebook page, Desgroseillers said he was the one who picked up the small calf and took it to the Wild at Heart Animal Shelter in Lively, Ont., but not before having to keep it for the night.
On his own Facebook page, he said the moose calf was "the sweetest thing ever except for the crying."
You might not think so, boys and girls, but you are, you ARE in film school, or you wouldn't be reading this, and you will be taking this quiz or I won't bring you your din-din.
Everyone has seen the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford classic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And if
you haven’t, how can you call yourself a film student? This is the movie in
which Bette Davis proves, once and for all, that she can mop the floor with
Joan Crawford and act rings around her, rings that are every bit as dizzying as
the donuts Blanche turns in her wheelchair when she discovers Jane has
served her a large rodent for dinner.
(From the production notes: the rat is actually a capybara imported from Argentina.They'll work for scale, whereas rats charge an exorbitant amount to lie still for that many takes).
This will by no means be a comprehensive exam, because that
would mean too much work for me, I saw this film for probably the twelfth time last night
and was struck once again by how it’s Jane who gets our sympathy. As in Gone With the Wind, in which we're supposed to love and admire Melanie for being so selfless and sweet, we just keep rooting for Scarlett. Want to
know why? There are reasons, brutal ones, but true nonetheless - which you will discover as you wrap your enfeebled brain around this quiz.
1. Why do we feel so much sympathy for Baby Jane the screaming
banshee/harridan/flaming bitch on wheels, who tears up the scenery, kills the maid with a hammer, and kicks
her sister in the head, and so little for Blanche, the sweet, helpless paralyzed sister
who sits upstairs in her room incessantly pressing a buzzer?
(a) Bette Davis gives a layered, nuanced performance
incorporating vulnerability and heartbreak into even her most drunken, violent, abrasive behaviour.
(b) Joan Crawford is mainly good at bulging her eyes out.
(c) We’ll never forgive or forget TROG.
d) Crawford's reaction to the dead capybara is seriously "off", failing to touch a chord of sympathy. Nobody notices her reaction anyway because they're too busy groaning with delight as Baby Jane cackles her brains out.
e) With true generosity of spirit, Jane wistfully states at the film's conclusion that the two sisters "could have been friends", if only Blanche had kept her foot off the accelerator.
2. If the Baby Jane doll could talk, what would it say?
(a) "Really? Did she like it?"
(b) "I was cleaning the cage and it flew out the window."
(c) "Isn't that how I was conceived?"
(d) "Just a few questions, ma'am."
3. Describe Edwin's role as a gay icon, taking into account the socio-psycho-sexual mores of 1962 and the damaging effects of the illegality of certain sexual acts. Speculate on Jane Hudson's true feelings for Edwin as a potential partner: is he merely a boy-toy/"walker" who could escort her to premieres and other social events as she makes her second debut? Elaborate on the socio-psycho-whatever significance of the fact he still lives with his Mommy. Essay answers to be graded on word count only.
3. Why is it our business whether Edwin is gay or not? What
possible bearing could it have on the movie’s plot? Why do you think it
matters, given the fact that the REAL issue is his inability to tear himself
away from his niggling, naggling, annoying, utterly irritating mother? Discuss in three words or less.
4. What are the chances of Baby Jane making a real comeback?
(a) Very low (her act is so completely out-of date);
(b) Very
high " " " ;
(d) Middling, if she aims for a middle-aged/middle-brow crowd;
(e) Dead-certain! Have you no knowledge of film history at all? She has already MADE an unforgettable
comeback which will live in cinematic history forever!
5. Of the two sisters, who has the really rotten deal?
(a) Blanche, who gets to watch herself on TV and get flowers from the neighbors and all sorts of fan
mail, get her meals brought to her on a tray, etc. etc., or
(b) Jane, who gets doodlysquat from anybody, has to forge signatures just to get her liquor, hauls her sister around to the bathroom, the bathtub and the bed, trundles her meals upstairs (though granted, those meals may be a little unusual), and receives no glory at all for her forgotten career, with which she supported the whole family
for years and years and kept them all in ice cream.
So here we are on another Monday morning (it's an afternoon, actually, but that Daylight Savings thing always messes with my head). And I've got Dylan on my mind once again. This song sticks in my head, as so many of his songs do. This was one that was picked up and covered by such diverse and unlikely recording artists as the Turtles, Johnny Cash, and even (inexplicably) Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix. Why? Because WE can't write songs like that, even though we long to. We. Can't. That's. Why. We might as well not even try. The reason I want to dig into this sere and juicy masterpiece is not because of those covers. This is usually viewed as one of Dylan's cruellest hit-and-run songs, a nasty one because of his (as I've touched on before) naked honesty, which can be breathtaking. It's said and widely believed that this song was aimed at his first great love, Suze Rotolo, the beaming girl glommed onto his arm on the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. She was also "the creative one" in his notorious Ballad in Plain D (which, I must admit, is pretty strong in places, though I wasn't there to witness that awful midnight scene: "Beneath the bare lightbulb the plaster did pound/Her sister and I in a screaming battleground/While she in between, the victim of sound/Soon shattered as a child to the shadows.")
This one, though. Let's focus on it. The opening line immediately calls to mind one of those primal Appalachian ballads - or if it isn't Appalachian, it should be:
Go away from my window Go away from my door Go away, way, way from my bedside And bother me no more And bother me no more
My sister used to sing this in a totally inappropriate, histrionic, quasi-operatic style drenched with pretentious mannerisms. ALL her songs were self-pitying and grim, with not one celebrating life or music or anything else. I call these her "I've been wronged and I'm not going to forget it" songs. But I digress.
Dylan seems to be building on that first line, but elaborates on his need to see the back of his lover once and for all. "Go 'way from my window" hooks us emotionally with that old (how old? We don't know, we only know it hooks us) song of mourning.
"Leave at your own chosen speed" seems pretty nasty - at first. But then look at it, lift it up, turn it over. Fast or slow, high or low - just go - but go slowly, he seems to be saying. Why slowly? Because this woman DOES NOT want to leave him. Obviously, she doesn't, or he would not have to sing this song. So her "own chosen speed" wouldn't be very fast - would it? It might just leave him enough time to change his mind.
"I'm not the one you want, babe/l'm not the one you need." This isn't really a "get lost" statement at all, but an acknowledgement of his own inadequacy. He goes on at length about this ("You say you're lookin' for someone. . ."), and seems to be listing his shortcomings. This illusive/elusive ideal is "never weak, but always strong", protecting and defending his lover whether she is "right or wrong": now is that fair, realistic, or even possible? And just who is it who can "open each and every door"? Obviously he's talking about someone who is making impossible demands on him, or perhaps exposing his vulnerabilities, which is pretty much the same thing.
It goes on like that: I'm not the one you want, babe/I will only let you down. But oh boy, here comes those lines that make Dylan seem like a total bastard: "Go lightly from the ledge, babe/Go lightly on the ground." Here he seems to be telling her something unthinkable: go jump out the window! But he doesn't mean that at all. Look at the word "ledge". It's a reference to that first line, and the way his spurned love keeps hanging around his windowsill in hopeless hope (and note it's not a door - a window into his soul, perhaps? Oh boy, it must be Monday.)
Then look yet deeper. It's not "off the ledge", is it? It's "FROM the ledge", as in "go 'way FROM my window", and moreover, he admonishes her to go "lightly", which you could not exactly do if you jumped out the window! No, I now think (and I just realized this moments ago when I cracked the walnut shell of this thing) "go lightly" means "leave, but with a light heart." Don't carry baggage from this. It'll only weigh you down. So "go lightly on the ground": walk with a light step. If you committed suicide, it wouldn't exactly be "lightly", would it? (And here's another meaning peeping out: "don't take this lightly," but in this case, "DO take it lightly", perhaps to spare her the kind of heartache he is feeling.)
All, some or none of this might be true. But it points to layered poetry, even in this, one of Dylan's "simpler" songs.
The verse goes on, each line piling on the demands she is making of him, so that each one seems more impossible than the one before. Is he feeling inadequate to the task? You tell me."Someone to die for you and more" - what "more" is there for him to do? But how much of this is true? If we're angry with someone we love, we accuse them of all kinds of shit they wouldn't even think of doing.We stack the deck against them to shore up our own weakness. What more do you want from me? I see evidence of a glass house here. What exactly did he expect of her? Was he performing that classic lover's ploy: reject her before she could reject him?
The most haunting lines are in the last verse: "Go melt back in the night" (echoing the gentle leavetaking of that "lightly off the ledge" line), a line that bespeaks a sort of illusion or beautiful dream evaporating into mist. "Everything inside is made of stone. There's nothing in here moving" - his emotions deadened by a loss he cannot accommodate - and, the one line that really looks like a slight, "and anyway, I'm not alone".
Dylan was almost never alone. I'm re-reading the several Dylan bios I have, and if ever a Lothario existed, it was him. I am sure he was unfaithful to Suze, in spite of her deep devotion to him: and in this, he may have felt inadequate, not good enough for her, and ready to defensively strengthen his own wobbly position any way he could. And perhaps he was right: he wasn't worthy. This vibrant, intelligent woman, "the could-be dream lover of my lifetime", died of cancer in her early 60s, while Dylan still grinds along, his energy stretched thin like Bilbo's in The Hobbit because somewhere along the line, he grabbed the Ring of Power. He even told someone (was it Ed Bradley?) that early in his career, he made a deal with the devil.
So here is Joan Baez singing this hurt/hurting song so tenderly, it's heartbreaking. There's no rancour here at all, merely sadness and regret. Baez still sings Dylan's songs in her concerts, and Dylan always speaks highly of her in the rare interviews he gives. "I generally like everything she does," he said when she recorded a double album of his songs in the '70s. And to explain the casual way he ignored her on that infamous London tour, he says, "You can't be in love and wise at the same time."
For it was Baez who broke up Bobby and Suze. There's no mistaking. Whether she knew it or not, whether it was really Suze's trip to Italy that did it, whether it was Suze who told Bobby to take a hike and get out of her face, Baez stepped into the turmoil that erupted in Ballad in Plain D, and grabbed the prize. I think it was a melancholy victory, however, for she never really "had" him after all: Baez went to see him when she heard he was sick, and a strange woman answered the door, a gorgeous exotic creature who looked like a model. She was. It was his new wife, Sara Lowndes, and Joan had had no idea he was married.
In the artistic economy, the Internet has not lived up to its hype. For years, the cybergurus liked to tell us about the “long tail” – the rise of niches, “unlimited variety for unique tastes” – that would give equal opportunities to tiny indie bands and Hollywood movies. People selling products of any kind would, in the new connected world, be able to sell small amounts to lots of small groups. Implicit in the idea was the promise that since niche tastes would form online communities not limited by national boundaries, a niche product might find a large international audience without traditional kinds of promotion in its home country. People in publishing bought this, too. The end result, we were told, would be an extremely diverse cultural world in which the lesbian vampire novel would be just as widely discussed as the Prairie short story and the memoir in tweets.
In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.
A couple of prominent commentators have made this argument recently about American culture at large. The musician David Byrne lamented, in a book of essays, that his recent albums would once have been considered modest successes but now no longer earn him enough to sustain his musical project. That’s David Byrne – he’s a great and famous artist. Just no Lady Gaga. The book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, by business writer Anita Elberse, argues that the days of the long tail are over in the United States. It makes more sense, she claims, for entertainment giants to plow as much money as they can into guaranteed hits than to cultivate new talent. “Because people are inherently social,” she writes cheerily, “they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do.”
Well, the same appears to be true of publishing, even in this country. There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.
Novelists have been complaining, privately at least, about the new castes in the literary hierarchy. This happens every year now, in the fall, the uneasiness – after the brief spurt of media attention that goes to the nominees and winners of the three major Canadian literary prizes, the Scotiabank Giller, the Governor-General’s, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust. The argument is that the prizes enable the media to single out a few books for promotion, and no other books get to cross the divide into public consciousness. And, say the spurned writers, this fact guides the publishers in their acquisitions. Editors stand accused of seeking out possible prize-winners (i.e. “big books”) rather than indulging their own tastes. This leads, it is said, to a homogenized literary landscape and no place at all for the weird and uncategorizable.
But even if this is true, what can one possibly do about it? Abolish the prizes? No one would suggest this – and even the critics of prize culture understand that the prizes were created by genuine lovers of literature with nothing but the best intentions, and that rewarding good writers financially is good, even necessary, in a small country without a huge market. It’s not, I think, the fault of the literary prizes that the caste system exists. Nor of the vilified “media” who must cover these major events. It’s the lack of other venues for the discussion and promotion of books that closes down the options. There were, in the nineties, several Canadian television programs on the arts. There were even whole TV shows about books alone. Not one of these remains. There were radio shows that novel-readers listened to. There were budgets for book tours; there were hotel rooms in Waterloo and Moncton. In every year that I myself have published a book there have been fewer invitations and less travel. Now, winning a prize is really one’s only shot at reaching a national level of awareness.
So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no? Look on the bright side: Poverty can be good for art. At least it won’t inspire you to write Fifty Shades of Grey.
BLOGGER'S NOTE. I re-ran this article strictly to make myself feel better. I was surprised to see how old it is, but in three years, things have only gotten worse. Strangely enough, it helps. It helps me feel that maybe-just-maybe I'm not the only one, though talking about failure is the greatest taboo and career-sinker there is. I don't remember seeing a single article about it on the internet, except for "oh, I was such a failure" followed by "but here is what I did to overcome this failure and find soaring success." Failure is something that really doesn't happen unless you go on to succeed, right? This is reflected by all those chirpy little Facebook memes about failure being a wonderful thing that you should "embrace", not be afraid of, and see as a stepping-stone to greater and greater victories. But what if it doesn't happen that way? When this article first came out, I felt a tremendous amount of comfort in these words, but it's the only piece I've ever found that dares to criticize the industry. Or something. The whole system? In no way, shape or form do I blame individual publishers for this state of affairs, because they're just trying to survive. It's a juggernaut, and if "numbers" are any indication (and sheer numbers of "likes" and "stars" are now the ONLY measure of a writer's worth), I've failed.
I've seen fellow writers strive and strive and hurl their work at the wall, and once in a while it cracks. I'm not so sure I am willing to do that. The system was always hard, but it wasn't impossible. I didn't sell a huge number of copies of my first two novels, but I guess you could say they were critically well-received. "Fiction at its finest" from the Edmonton Journal now seems particularly heartbreaking. The Montreal Gazette books section gave me an entire page, with (mysteriously) a huge picture of me in colour, and said this book deserved to be on the bestseller list but never would be, because it was published and publicized on such a small scale. So the praise was sort of backhanded, after all, and only set up false hopes. I thought I had a shot. I didn't, and I know now that it would've been better, if I wanted TGC to see the light of day, to just set up a blog for it and hope for the 10 - 25 views I usually get. But it's 10 - 25 more views than I'd get if I did nothing. I can't lie in wait any more. I have to "move on", wherever "on" is. "Let go", and not "let God" because there isn't one, though I was a lay minister and taught Bible classes for fifteen years. Now THERE is a story of heartbreak, but I didn't just make it up out of my own head.
I know I don't make myself popular by getting into this stuff, as it's seen as "being negative", which is a big no-no no matter how dire things are. Just paste a smile on and keep turning that facet of yourself towards the world/social media (though turning and turning and turning it like that can be completely exhausting). People who are seriously interested in writing (or becoming writers, which is another thing entirely) want to believe that I am an anomaly. I suspect I'm not. The difference is, I talk about it, openly admit I have failed, and no one else does. If somebody tells me not to do something, I will immediately want to do it. And usually I do, fuck the consequences, because as a writer, it is all I have. Shouldn't I be able to write about anything I want or need to? I will continue to, whether it is popular or not. It does not matter, in the long run. In the world's terms, success will never come to me, even though I have been told over and over again that I have the "right stuff". So I will write whatever comes into my head. No law against it. And I can guarantee it will always be honest and tell my truth, whether it would fit on a Facebook meme or not.
