Say yes, and start again

(This started off as a letter to a friend, someone I hardly ever see. But I'd rather put it here. If I don't take risks, will I ever grow? If someone sees that I am lost and hurt and vulnerable, as well as joyful and expansive and creative, will the world come to an end? Yes, but here it is anyway.)

“Progres Riport”. Not knowing where to start. Starting in the middle. Which end of a merry-go-round do you jump on? Sometimes it's an ugly-go-round. But it goes around; it goes around.


I stare outside the window of my sort-of-new office, my own space at last (and how did I survive without it? I transformed a sort of catch-all utility room upstairs into a dream space where I can really work, and dream). I see cedar boughs at all different levels, like beaded curtains or fringed canopies. The light is hitting them and they look different moment to moment, never look the same way twice. Some days they flail and heave and slap at the windows. Today they wave like palms and seem to say hosanna! They look happy. I want to be. What’s happy?

There was a big tornado in my life some years ago, and now everything’s different. Am I happy? Things have changed, that’s for sure. I can’t hang out with people who ascribe to ideas that make me itchy or downright angry. I cannot conform for the sake of being part of the group. That means no more United Church (though I did try three other churches and found them all boring, even the Unitarians, who were almost all old, but at least welcoming and nice, not putting their hand on the pew beside them and saying, "No, my family sits here"). I guess I was a different person then. Better?

I spend my most productive time blogging, or blossoming. My time with the grandchildren is timeless, and I savor every second, even when they’re being pissy or unreasonable (which doesn’t happen too often: they adore me, and are generally pretty well-behaved). It’s not that I can’t write! Heavens no. After the big crash of 2005, I honestly wondered, and even asked my shrink Pee Wee Herman(and he really does look like Pee Wee Herman) if he thought I’d write another novel, and he said, quite honestly I thought, “I don’t know.”

Harold Lloyd erupted not long after that, and I was off. Not only that, I was in love.

I have no objectivity about this project whatsoever, and my motives in wanting it in print range from the totally idealistic (I want to enlighten the world and make Harold a household name again) to the crass (I want money and fame) to the nuts (he’s been speaking to me through automatic writing for years now and telling me it’s going to be a big success). I just want this, I want it. I don’t need a reason, really. A writer writes, a teller of tales tells tales. Not to the void, but to people. Will someone finally get on board with me?

So I can still write, better than ever (I think), I can still have an orgasm (better than ever, I think: my body has awakened to a late-blooming ecstasy), I have an incredible extension of my family that I couldn’t have dreamed of, I can still perceive music in 3D and sensurround: but is it “enough”? Do I even, I wonder, have a concept of enough? I’d like to get somewhere, that’s what. I want success, and I haven’t had any and I deserve it, everyone says so, then they don’t help me. Even Harold’s biographer read the novel and said he loved it, then wouldn’t help me. No one will. So I probably seem desperate and obnoxious in trying so hard to get what I want/need.

I know I am not. I am being reasonable in wanting what I want. Walls have been knocked out of my house. Some of it just shattered, and it was awful, because it was like one of those prismatic glass wind chimes just smashing against a wall. There was no getting it back. I still have times when I feel panicky and lost. But life is not an exercise in feeling glutted and good, at least not all the time. Life is an exercise in exercise, and in feeling.

I think the instrument is more tuned, even though I no longer have any desire to play the violin which I now realized I didn’t enjoy studying very much. I was caught in this “thing” with my teacher, not an affair but something far more problematic, and he needed me far more than I needed him. He was the one who said things like “there’s no such thing as mental illness, it’s just a weak personality”, and after a while this “weak personality” didn’t need him any more. I hated practicing and was nervous as hell performing, but I put myself up to it, I dared myself for reasons of my own. I guess it was OK while it lasted, but it lasted nine years and then I just couldn’t do it any more, because I knew I didn’t sound very good and never would. I was speaking broken English, not the Thoreau or G. M. Hopkins of the real violinist.

So all this fell away. God, a lot fell away and there really has been nothing to replace it. I’m essentially a loner and even border on the antisocial, but I do get lonely sometimes. I go on Facebook and have, like, 24 friends or something while a person I know has 1,024. How in hell can you keep all those “friends” straight? Does she even know who they are? I had a hard time finding the 24 and even dropped one guy cuz he was a creep. (His name is Lloyd Dykk, by the way. Stay away from him.)

And just now, I remember how much more was happening during that tornado-time: I lost four friends. Four. One died of a lightning heart attack, just dropped in his tracks. He was exactly my age. One died of cancer, another of AIDS. Glen, whom I never met but deeply loved, committed suicide.

I want to go on my woods-walk, I want to encounter a bear or an old imaginary shamanic spiritual guide and start feeling like I’m on the “right” path. I am still living in music and I make art, but differently now. All my life is an attempt to make art. Clunky way of putting it, I know that, but I want MORE MORE MORE. I was born hungry and maybe will die that way. I am sick of trying to find out why. I’ve gained a whole lot of weight lately because I’m waiting to hear back on something very very important and I am afraid they’ll forget all about me and not even bother to tell me they’re not interested. So I eat.

I suppose if I had it all together I wouldn’t, but fuck that, eh? I “fluctuate”, like my daughter-in-law Crystal says (and she usually has it right). I wax and wane. I probably always will. I wonder if I will live a long time, wonder if I’ll die young, as I’d almost prefer to. I know now my fundamental purpose, I have absolutely not a hair of doubt about that: to love. With my grandkids I can just relax into that love and be that love and just let time flow, timelessly. But there is all the rest of life to be lived, and why do I feel like such a beginner?

You know what? I don’t need the advice that is likely rising to your lips even as I write. But I thought that I wanted to share this with you. In the moments when you forget to teach or give advice, you have great grace. Oh, maybe they’re nanoseconds, but I do notice them. I think probably it comes out of great suffering. Not that I recommend it, but something has to arise from it, because God (or the great whatever) can’t be that cruel.

I just have one more story to tell. It’s amazing, a true miracle. My daughter Shannon is friends with a woman who had two little girls. A couple of years ago when we had that big dump of snow, she and her husband took them sledding on a big hill. The girls were about age six and four. The four-year-old sledded down where dozens of other kids were sliding, but something went wrong. The sled somehow turned and veered into a road and a truck turned the corner and ploughed into the little girl and she was killed in an instant.

This happened on Christmas Eve.

I am proud to say my daughter, who is one gutsy lady and does not flinch from adversity, was the one friend who would just sit with Rosanna and let her talk or cry or whatever she needed to do. Her other friends mostly backed away, afraid of saying the wrong thing. The following Christmas, everyone just recoiled, freaked about the anniversary, and Shan called her and said, “So, I guess you guys don’t want to do Christmas, eh?” She said, “No, we don’t.” It was so straight and honest.

Little Lucia was best friends with my granddaughter Caitlin, who was heartbroken and struggling with bafflement and grief. I did my best to listen to her when she needed to talk, which she did, a lot. For a while she thought she was somehow going to die too, until I explained that an accident is an accident and no one ever wanted it to happen or planned for it.


They even lost their home. The guy who inadvertently killed their daughter was their next-door neighbour, so they felt they had to move. There was no end to the heartbreak.

Rosanna’s in her early 40s and decided to try to have a baby, her last chance. She did several courses of in vitro, and none of them worked. After three miscarriages, she was so beaten down emotionally that she had to quit, plus they had run out of money. She works as a beautician and was doing a woman’s nails, and the woman started talking about how she was a benefactress who paid for treatments for infertile couples who couldn’t afford in vitro.

She said something like “you have no idea what it’s like for a couple to miscarry again and again”. Rosanna burst into tears and ran out of the room (which she has never done in her life before) and the woman, instead of getting all embarrassed and leaving, ran after her. Rosanna told her the whole story (which she has never done in her life before!) and the woman INSISTED that she pay for just one more round of in vitro. Rosanna of course said she couldn’t possibly do that, and the woman said yes you can, and she said she’d talk to her husband about it.

After a lot of turbulent debate, the answer was “yes”.


It was the last shot, and three embryos were implanted. Things seemed fine at first, then went horribly wrong: she was miscarrying again. Shannon couldn’t even reach her, she just wasn’t talking to anyone.

Then, a couple of weeks later she phoned and said, “Shannon, I feel like I’m still pregnant.” Shannon went, hmmm. She better go see her doctor. She went, and:

She was still pregnant. One embryo had held on through the storm.


She had a completely normal pregnancy, and just gave birth to a beautiful little girl named Stella Lucia. I’m knitting her one of my famous blankies in my favourite pattern, called feather and fan. This was a story that had many wrenching twists and turns, and at any point it could have broken down and the miracle wouldn’t have happened. But it did happen, and all because they had the outrageous, illogical courage to say yes, and start again.

Alley Cat

You would not believe what I went through to get this!! I was on a search for Leroy Anderson pieces I remembered from hearing them on Captain Kangaroo, and found a ton of them (Fiddle-Faddle, The Typewriter, Plink-Plank-Plunk, etc.) Then I started hearing this piano piece in my head, over and over, and thought: could this be Leroy Anderson? It didn't seem quite right. But I couldn't get it out of my head. It had a simple, whimsical piano melodly played over the repetition of one note. But how on earth would I ever find the title?


Thank God for random associations. I remembered seeing an episode of Mad About You where the couple was on a dance floor, and this song came on, and Helen Hunt started doing all these silly cat movements. But googling cat songs got me nowhere.


Then I thought: by era? It had a '50s sound. Popular piano pieces of the 1950s? I went on YouTube, and (incredibly) the title Alley Cat came up in about a second, and I knew I had struck gold.


And yes, people do dance to this, line dance even.


Meow-meow-meow-meow! (But who the hell is Bent Fabric??)

God's apology

Came across something today that struck me as exquisite, and it reminded me of a friend - someone no longer near, because he's crossed over into Mystery Land and now walks with his ancestors. We were friends for less than a year, but it was life-changing: both of us were in the trenches, and as the bullets flew and the bombs thundered overhead, we sat in Starbuck's and compared souls. I know he'd get this, and laugh in that half-delighted, half-wincing way of his, the way that saved my life. Peter! This is for you:

"Friends are God's way of apologizing to us for our families."

A gorgeous version of an old favorite

I've been rediscovering Leroy Anderson, a composer I once dismissed as kitschy, and, surprise:  his compositions (The Syncopated Clock, The Typewriter, Fiddle-Faddle) are charming and very well-written. He also wrote the perennial favorite Sleigh Ride, which I didn't appreciate until I tried to play it on the violin! Whew. It's much more sophisticated than it first appears. His lesser-known stuff makes me say, "Oh, THAT!", which is a mark of something, i. e. he has worked his way into popular culture, and deservedly. I first heard most of these on Captain Kangaroo, with bizarre pre-video effects like construction-paper puppets against a felt background.

Cranbrook Deer

Cranbrook Deer

A doe, a fawn, a very foolish cat, and an unfortunate dog. This video has become a classic. Note how the graceful mother deer can suddenly lunge, batter, and spring through the air with tremendous speed.

I've watched this several times, and I notice a few things: the cat must have the scent of the fawn all over its fur, so I wonder that the mother deer tolerated it for as long as she did. Maybe the cat was too small and clueless to worry about. When the fawn suddenly lay down, I wonder if it was instinctively responding to the scent of the large dog, a serious threat. It may also have triggered the shockingly unexpected response from the doe.

She exploded into action in a frightening way and quickly dispatched the dog. I wonder if it survived. This is pretty intense and illustrates the protective maternal instinct. We tend to think of a doe as a gentle creature, i. e. Bambi's mother, but they can be as fierce as elk in the mating season. Don't mess with them!

Held hostage

OK, the postal strike: seems like it's been going on for months now, though  I don't know how long exactly. It began as "rotating" strikes, meaning your town could be hit at random. So who cares about a bunch of whining postal workers demanding to be paid more just for walking around?

I'm not directly involved in this mess, except to suffer the frustrating consequences, so the above statement is likely unfair, not to mention uninformed. All I know is that the NDP held the country hostage on the weekend, conducting a strange thing called a filibuster, which seems to be a cross between filberts (nuts!) and a Peanut Buster Parfait.

This went on for 146 hours or something, who cares how long, and people compared NDP leader Jack Layton to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where he filibustered his brains out to the point of collapse. (Unlike Layton, Stewart was a legendary talent who could pull it off and actually make the whole thing entertaining.) Finally the Conservative government ordered everybody back to work, and supposedly by Tuesday the mail would "flow" again.

From my standpoint, it wasn't exactly "flow". Two pieces of mail eeked through, both of them things that looked like bills (with windows) but actually weren't: advertising's way of making us think, gee whiz, look at this! It must be important.

Why did the posties deliver these things first? They looked at them and saw windows and said, gee whiz, look at this! etc. etc.

I have a tendency to ferret out books for one cent on Amazon.ca. These are brand new books, some of which have only been out for a couple of years. No one believes me when I tell them about this, though they're easy to find in the New and Used section. I think the problem, besides the fact that for some reason I seem to have zero credibility, is that no one wants anything "used": it makes people think of stale old Salvation Army bins reeking of someone else's armpits.


Literally, I had five books in the pipeline, a record number, when everything came to a screeching halt. Four were from Amazon, but one of them was a review copy for a piece I was assigned to write for the Edmonton Journal, which has now (in the lovely parlance of journalism) been "killed". I also have a free-floating cheque from the Journal for a piece I wrote for them in April. I honestly wonder if I'll ever see it.


I keep thinking about all those thousands, maybe millions of pieces of mail from all across the country that are now in that no-man's-land called the Dead Letter Office. I remember as a school child being threatened that if I didn't get the postage or the address exactly right, that's where my letter would end up, a T. S. Eliot-esque wasteland of correspondence from which there was no return. 

I think this whole bound-and-gagged feeling is stirring up resentment from a strike about ten years ago, infinitely worse than this one or any one I can even think of. It was a bus strike in Vancouver, the usual thing where the Union wanted a 5,000% increase or something like that. 


Since buses are primarily used by senior citizens, people in wheelchairs, the mentally challenged, blind people with golden retrievers, and teenagers, nothing was done for weeks. And weeks. And weeks.


There were a few letters to the editor about this, but the "issue" was so pallid and public interest so non-existent that the strike wore on for a month. Then.  . . two months.


Then, three. Then it became apparent that the month of August was even more useless for trucking around the lame, the halt and the blind than the month of July or June or May, because after all, everyone goes on holiday in August, don't they? For a whole month, at least.

If you don't have the means to go on holiday, if you're on a pension or a fixed income, why then. . . And if you're a bus driver, for heaven's sake, don't you deserve a break?


Irreparable damage was done by this strike, most of it invisible and unheard. Elderly people were unable to get to their medical appointments. People with mental challenges couldn't make their speech therapy sessions, and fell back. Mothers with small babies had to stay home on pitilessly rainy days and listen to them scream and scream and scream. The teenaged kids hitchhiked or sat behind older kids on motorbikes or just drove without a license. No danger there: they're just kids.

This strike was not even remotely addressed until September, when the workforce began to need bus service again. I mean, regular people. Working people, the kind that earn a living wage. None of those embarrassing folk who have to get around on the Loser Cruiser.


Yes, this thing went on for an incredible FOUR months, and this in a major Canadian city that constantly congratulates itself on being "world-class", a city that blathers away about "carbon footprints" and the "greener" alternative.

Such as, public transit.

I don't know, in all the years I've taken transit, not one person has praised me for being "greener". When people find out I use the bus, I get an "ohhhhh", a downward-inflected "ohhhhh" which expresses a sort of embarrassment tinged with pity, as if I've just told them I have bleeding hemorrhoids.

It's OK to pay lip service to transit. Or even to have the odd car-less day, covered eagerly by the news cameras to show the country how environmentally responsible we are in Vancouver. We lead the entire country, in fact!  But as for actually not driving. . .


As one of those mentally-compromised old ladies who regularly use the bus, I felt the lack of it keenly. But I also felt something else. Marginalized. Shunted aside. Powerless. I didn't even have a voice in this. I was shouting into a vacuum.

This stirs up stuff in me, you know? Because somehow, that just seems to be the story of my whole frigging life.


This postal strike didn't drag on for four months, but the only reason it went as long as it did was because of the sort of people who still rely on the mail: old people waiting for their pension cheques, charities mailing out those little guilt-inducing packages in hope of a donation, and people like me, waiting in vain for their piddly little, useless, unimportant review copies so they can get to work again.

It somehow just sounds all too familiar. If you're powerless, you can all too easily be held hostage. 

OWN up, Oprah!

This is the Daily Schedule for OWN.

Want to find OWN in your area? Check our channel listing.

6:00 pm Ryan & Tatum: the O'Neals

7:00 pm The Healthy Gourmet

7:30 pm Eat Yourself Sexy

8:00 pm The Cupcake Girls

8:30 pm The Cupcake Girls

9:00 pm Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes

10:00 pm Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World

11:00 pm Ryan & Tatum: the O'Neals

12:30 pm Everyday Food
 
1:00 am The Locator
 
1:30 am Why Not with Shania Twain
 
3:00 am The Right Fit
 
3:30 am Breathing Space Yoga
 
4:00 am Smart Cookies
 
4:30 am Dollars and Sense with Alison Griffiths
 
5:00 am Maxed Out
 
5:30 am Maxed Out
 
6:00 am The Shopping Bags
 
6:30 am The Shopping Bags
 
7:00 am Tosca: Flexing at 49
 
7:30 am Remedy Me!
 
8:00 am Mystery Diagnosis
 
9:00 am Becoming Chaz
 
11:00 am Big Voice
 
11:30 am Big Voice
 
12:00 pm Ryan & Tatum: the O'Neals
 
1:00 pm Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes
 
2:00 pm Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World
 
3:00 pm Ghostly Encounters
 
3:30 pm Ghostly Encounters
 
4:00 pm Psychic Investigators
 
4:30 pm Psychic Investigators
 
5:00 pm Rescue Mediums
 
5:30 pm Rescue Mediums
 
6:00 pm Breaking Down the Bars
 
7:00 pm Dark Waters of Crime
 
8:00 pm The Devil You Know
 
9:00 pm Ghostly Encounters
 
9:30 pm Ghostly Encounters
 
10:00 pm The Locator
 
10:30 pm The Locator
 
11:00 pm Cristina Ferrare's Big Bowl of Love
 
11:30 pm Annabel Langbein: The Free Range Cook

 
You've got to "own" this, Oprah: your new network is bad. Real bad. It's bad because it's boring. The pallid programming is a real disappointment. And I really wanted to like it, or at least keep on tuning in for a while. But every time I do, it slips downhill a little more.

Oprah has bombed before, most notably with her ego-driven masterwork Beloved, which in spite of her aggressive media-blitz and constant insistence that "this is my Schindler's List" turned out to be an indecipherable mess. In a desperate attempt to recapture those fine and fizzy days of The Color Purple (for which she deservedly won an Oscar nomination), she plunked herself down in the middle of a confusing tangle of a movie, surrealism mixed with violence and a side of racial injustice. It had to sell, didn't it?


No, it didn't.  This sent her into a depression worse than the one she suffered when, after starving herself on an appalling and dangerous liquid diet, all the excess weight came back, and then some.

I get peevish about Winfrey because she began with what looked like real integrity and altruism. But over the years, her fans became sycophants. They cheered insanely and wept when she walked onstage. It was as if she couldn't make a wrong move.

But this new network of hers is a bow-wow. I was amazed at how many quasi-supernatural shows there are, along with the inevitable Gayle King talk show, and reality programs with has-been celebs like Ryan and Tatum O'Neill (who spend the hour taking nasty jabs at each other) and Sarah Ferguson, who insists she's a "victim" of the journalist who outed her for agreeing to sell her ex-husband to the press.

They trapped her! Fooled her! How dare they! So now she's all depressed and hates herself, trying to gain our sympathy in spite of being a felon, at least until the last episode when she is required to make a dramatic turnaround.


I wanted to like Lisa Ling and Our America, and I watched all of them to give it a chance, but it too is pallid and lacks muscle, insight and conviction. If Oprah really chose these programs, and surely to God she must have at least okayed them, she showed a stunning lack of insight/foresight. Ling's show seems to deal exclusively with gender and sexuality issues, as in "pray the gay away" and men going to Third World countries to find (or purchase) "brides".

Her mushy style of journalism is one of the main problems. Ling should stop all the hand-holding and drop the concerned, furrowed brow, which makes her as annoying as that psychologist on Hoarders, whatever her name is, the one who always seems to wear a look of terrible anxiety mixed with practiced compassion.

I can't see into the future - thank God - but my feeling is that this network might just tank. It won't hurt the Big O financially - nothing could - but Kitty Kelley's bombshell book Oprah reveals how hypersensitive the queen of talk TV is to any kind of failure. That is why she spent an entire episode facing the camera and making excuses about her weight gain, then drowning out her guest, the author of Women, Food and God (who barely got a word in about her book) by blathering on and on about how the book was an "epiphany" for her (though I certainly don't see her getting any thinner).


I've written about Oprah before, and I suppose she must count as one of my perennial obsessions. Maybe this is why I have five followers, because my blog is just as boring as OWN! Seriously, I'm  being this tough on her because over the years, her astonishing vanity and habit of rolling around in material wealth has just escalated and escalated, until it dragged her entire audience into the vortex. For the first time since she bailed on her famous book club due to weak ratings, people began to get turned off.

The worst show on OWN (so far) is a behind-the-scenes look at the final season of the show, in which Oprah reveals her frightening diva-hood in all its queasy glory. Her producers tiptoe around her and run into back rooms to sob if she's unhappy with what they've done. In a spectacular instance of passing the buck, she recently canned the CEO of OWN, temporarily replacing her with some guy from Discovery Health (the pallid non-network that OWN supposedly replaced).


Why does this annoy me so much? When a woman has this much influence, she should stop the self-aggrandisement, the constant public insistence of how much good she is doing, and actually do some good. We don't want to see a freakish Ryan O'Neill, his face turned into a rubber mask by bad plastic surgery, throwing poison darts at his (so-called) bitch of a daughter, while his (so-called) bitch of a daughter snaps and snarls about her heartless Dad. This is enlightenment? It's not even entertainment. If you're going to throw the Christians to the lions, which reality TV seems to do, let's not make them stuffy lions from the Walmart.

And more cupcakes we do not need. I don't know how anyone can squeeze a whole show out of a cupcake (or a cookie, for that matter). OK then, enough grousing about what's wrong: so what would I like to see? I love to watch Dateline, 20-20 and 48 Hours, simply because a few times per season they do something fascinating, even riveting. But even the rest of the time, they're still watchable. So there's room for some tough, hard-edged reporting on something besides cross-dressing. Think Diane Sawyer. Think Greta van Susteren. Think, even, Nancy Grace! Awful as she can be, she cuts through the bullshit every time. OK, not these people specifically, but surely there's someone out there who's NOT a name, or not yet, who can do this (for didn't someone take a chance on Oprah herself, a long time ago?)

And in case you think I'm completely against the supernatural, I'm not. I have had plenty of scalp-crawling experiences myself, including my strange walk in the woods from a few posts ago where I found a bridge lying on the grass.  But I have a suggestion here. If Oprah must indulge her apparent craving for the paranormal, why not present decent biographies (where did they go, by the way? Didn't there used to be a real biography channel, now taken over by retreads of Hoarders?) about such fascinating figures as psychic healer Edgar Cayce, theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky, and the Fox sisters, pioneers of spiritualism? But nobody wants to learn anything: they want to one-up each other with creepy-crawly stories so their hair stands on end in a sort of cheap psychic orgasm.

Even one show about the supernatural may be too much, but please don't show the same episode four times in 24 hours. These programs are completely unwatchable, and about as entertaining as a stoned Ouija-board session with a bunch of 14-year-old girls.

Limit the cooking shows to one or two chefs who really have some talent, maybe undiscovered talent.
Get someone other than Gayle King to host your flagship talk show. Hiring your girl friend/platonic life partner doesn't guarantee a quality program.

And can't you see the conflict between shows like The Healthy Gourmet with other programs that focus solely on cookies and cupcakes? I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. It's as schizophrenic as women's magazines, in which the latest diet craze appears right next to glossy photos of devil's food cake with an inch of icing.

If you add up OWN programming so far, it's pretty insulting to the women it's supposed to cater to. Oprah must assume we love to see:


(a) people with narcissistic personality disorder playing out their nasty little domestic wars,


(b) high-profile celebrities (Sarah??) plummeting into bankruptcy and disgrace due to their own selfish stupidity,


(c) shows obsessed with dieting, fitness and nutrition, and


(d) shows about cupcakes.


OK den, I guess I've had my say. Oprah does not cope well with public failure, so if her new network continues to limp along, I can see her doing one of two things: scrapping all the current programming and starting from scratch, or scrapping the entire enterprise. Even the boring shows on Discovery Health don't repeat the same pallid ghost story four times in one day.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Whenever I walk in a London street

Whenever I walk in a London street,

I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;

And I keep in the squares,

And the masses of bears,

Who wait at the corners all ready to eat

The sillies who tread on the lines of the street

Go back to their lairs,

And I say to them, "Bears,

Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"


 
 
 
 
 

Christopher Robin Milne

The Wolf and the Little Nun: a Faery Tale

That Hieronymus Bosch, what a kidder. In trying to find images for my last post (which, by the way, I photographed myself, so don't make any stupid comments), I found this. I can only look at Bosch a little piece at a time, for the horror of his dark world disturbs me too much. I remember reading a remarkable book called Leap by Terry Tempest Williams, a Mormon writer who decided to analyze and decipher the hidden meanings in Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Delights. When I first saw it, I thought, OK then, if this is delight, I'd like to see purgatory!

This little detail of one of his paintings, I don't know which one, just caught me. I isolated the figure of the nun (for surely that's a nun) who might be doing one of several things: holding her hands up in surrender, keeping the wolf at bay, or gesturing it forward.

In the foreground, a wolf ravages a figure that I at first thought was female, but upon closer inspection is a man. He appears to be offering little resistance (i.e. he is either caressing the wolf, or half-heartedly pushing it away, though his hand looks red and mangled.) The wolf has a knife weirdly stuck through the skin on its back. 

But this other bit, the wolf and the little nun: I had to isolate her and do my usual color invert and see what happened. Most of the time this doesn't do anything but make a picture look weird, but once in a while (as with my very ordinary amateur paintings), something unexpected pops out.

Bosch was a subtle fellow, and he may have known something about the negative of a picture, even if such a thing did not remotely exist in his time. For who do we see when the painting is inverted?

It's all too strange, too strange to be comprehended. I'm glad I didn't know the fellow.

(Postscript, from the next day: Jesus! If this really is supposed to be The Man, he's in the classic pose of crucifixion. All that's missing is the cross. That Bosch. Such a kidder.)