Gay, but not OK: The secret life of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Oh Lor'! What have I gotten myself into? Gerard Manley Hopkins?

Gerard Man-friggenly Hop-friggen-kins?

Though I suspected it from some of his imagery, it turns out the poor blighter (who stood only 5'2" on his tippy-toes) suffered all his life from repressed homosexual longing. Reminds me a bit of the E. M. Forster book/movie Maurice, though in that version the protagonist eventually consummates his lust with the gamekeeper, a la Lady Chatterley's Lover.  (It seems that literary figures have a certain need to "fuck down"). 

Even  Wiki-friggin'-pedia has a whole section on this. I was enthralled. Even more enthralling was one of his more homoerotic poems, excerpted below. (Believe me, you would not want to read the whole thing.) Several of the juicier poems were un-find-able, likely because they were not published during his lifetime (kind of like that W. H. Auden poem, The Platonic Blow, which I will NOT reproduce here. I do have some standards. You can, however, look it up yourself, you dirty old thing.)

Erotic influences

Some contemporary critics believe that Hopkins' suppressed erotic impulses played an important role in the tone, quality and even content of his works. These impulses seem to have taken on a degree of specificity after he met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian". The Hopkins biographer Robert Bernard Martin asserts that when Hopkins first met Dolben, on Dolben's 17th birthday, in Oxford in February 1865, it "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life."


Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him.

Hopkins kept up a correspondence with Dolben, wrote about him in his diary and composed two poems about him, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End." Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918). 

Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's High Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning in June 1867, an event which greatly affected Hopkins, although his feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled a good deal by that time. "Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben’s death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... [for] many of Hopkins’s best poems — impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost belovèd and his muse — were the result."

Some of his poems, such as The Bugler's First Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes, although this second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments. One contemporary literary critic, M.M. Kaylor, has argued for Hopkins's inclusion with the Uranian poets, a group whose writings derived, in many ways, from the prose works of Walter Pater, Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams, and later his lifelong friend.

Excerpts from The Bugler's First Communion:

Here he knelt then ín regimental red.
Forth Christ from cupboard fetched, how fain I of feet
To his youngster take his treat!
Low-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.

There! and your sweetest sendings, ah divine,
By it, heavens, befall him! as a heart Christ’s darling, dauntless;
Tongue true, vaunt- and tauntless;
Breathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine.

Frowning and forefending angel-warder
Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him;
March, kind comrade, abreast him;

How it dóes my heart good, visiting at that bleak hill,
When limber liquid youth, that to all I teach
Yields tender as a pushed peach,
Hies headstrong to its wellbeing of a self-wise self-will!

Ye gods, eh? Shall we count the ways? I don`t really know where to begin. `Knelt`might, to some, indicate a certain sexual posture, a la Monica Lewinsky and her Presidential knee pads. This cupboard thing, I don`t know, maybe it`s just a miniature closet or something. "To his youngster take his treat", well. . . If Hopkins` muse was a 17-year-old kid, the term  "youngster" might indeed apply, but the poet wouldn`t be welcome at communion again any time soon.

"Tongue true. . . Breathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine. . . `" Oh dear oh dear. I find it hard NOT to think of that as sexual.  The poem even has the word "molest" in it, though maybe it meant something different back then (but I doubt it). "Limber liquid youth"  is just too descriptive. "Tender as a pushed peach" implies all sorts of stuff, or it could. . . pushing "something" on "someone"? And doesn't a peach look just a little bit like a. . .  It just goes on and on.

All this repressed eroticism leads me to a different point. (A more serious one, this time - another hairpin turn).  The myth is that such repression is no longer necessary, that "gay is OK", that there is no need for the closet any more.

This is far from the truth.

If you are gay and come from a fundamentalist family of any stripe, Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Sikh, there is a very good chance that your sexual orientation will not be accepted.

You might even be expected to "give it up" as you'd give up a favorite food for Lent. Except in this case, you'd be expected to give it up for a lifetime.

I've heard of those dreadful-sounding Christian anti-gay camps where people "pray the gay away". Young men and women (I presume most of them are young, but I could be wrong) are so contrite and guilty about what they feel, so sure that it's sinful and wrong, that they subject themselves to this anti-gay programming/propaganda. In one particularly repugnant Christian magazine, this was referred to as "healing".

The United Church of Canada is mighty smug about leading the way in gay acceptance, and the percentage of gay clergy is staggering (though no one keeps statistics on these things). Other mainstream Christian denominations are very reluctantly beginning to trot like lambs behind them, just beginning to "look at" issues like gay marriage.

So what do I think? We're in a weird place right now, somewhere between Gerard Manley Hopkins with his suffocating chastity and Oscar Wilde's galloping promiscuity (which, tragically, ended up landing him in prison). We don't know what to think. Celebrities have pushed hard to make being gay not only acceptable, but chic.

And yet, what's one of the worst epithets you hear in schools, particularly high schools? "He's so gay." "That's the gayest thing I ever saw." And so on. Not so accepting, is it? We wouldn't pretend to extend civil rights to everyone, and in the next breath say, "He's such a nigger."

This is a sick, confusing society, and I am sick of it. It's getting harder and harder for me to be happy in it. To some degree, unless you totally turn your back on it, you have to get along in it and within it. That means giving up a part of yourself, compromising. How much does that cost?

Certain poets knew.

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What in Christ's name does this mean?

The Starlight Night

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! 

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! 

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! 

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows. 

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! 

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house 

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse 

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

So what does the poem mean?

What means this bizarre double-jointed curvature, this sharp hairpin turn from fireworks "ooooooohs" and "ahhhhhhhhs" into the kind of heavy and even suffocating religiosity that leaves me completely kerflummoxed?

I don't know much about Gerard Manley Hopkins except to say that when he became a Jesuit, he burned every poem he had ever written. Thus perhaps some of his best works were relegated to the ashcan.

He's the one who wrote about depression, that Carrion Comfort one that I find so harrowing, to the point that I think he must have been a true sufferer. But why must everything in Hopkins be Christified?

The poem starts off very much like an innocent Robert Louis Stevenson verse for children, a "how would you like to go up in a swing" sort of thing. But there is a sort of urgency to it, as if we'd better look now or we'll be too late. It seems to tug and poke at us, hey, take a look up there, look at Casseopeia (which I can NEVER see - I am the poorest of visual discerners and can't tell one bloody constellation from another). Then comes a flood of almost-precious elven description right out of Lord of the Rings. Cockle-shells and dingle-bells. Except that, because it's Hopkins, he can get away with it. It's a surprising, even shocking quality, the art of verbal daring.

Fire-folk sitting in the air, why yes, that's a line any poet would kill for. Quickgold: that's perfect, isn't it - why didn't anyone think of that before? The air swirls with magic, you can see your breath, you're shivering yet too warm, your companion's hand is like ice in yours. Yes, you're there, transported, borne up like a downy feather (take THAT, Gerard!) as the constellations wheel drunkenly over your head.

Where I go off-course is in the line, "Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize." What can he be getting at? Taken literally, it makes no sense at all. Purchase what? Prize what? Does he mean we have to earn the right to get into heaven, so to speak - heaven represented by the rapturous star-filled night? Is immortality a kind of lottery, a spiritual 6-49?

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

I don't know if he's talking about "buying your way in", trying to bribe God (good luck!), or the cheapness and crassness of reality compared to the gasping celestial vision. It's one of those weirdball Hopkins-ian things that makes you want to toss the book across the room.

But then he gets back to the "look, look" stuff, which by now is getting a little old (can't help but think it!) in spite of the "Maymess" (a word I really thought *I* had invented) and the "mealed-with-yellow sallows".

But then come the strangest lines of all.

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

I don't know, this grounds the poem with a thud, steals all its magic. Hopkins must have had some sort of a thing for Christ, and it's weird. When I first read this startling thing, my reaction was "what"? These are indeed the - barn? And what are "the shocks"? Kindly explain yourself, poet.

I can only guess - and I am really guessing here, because this is an odd thing that doesn't make much sense even after a lot of analysis - that he thinks of the heavens/nature and all that jazz as "housing" Jesus and Mary and all those holy folk who to him represent God. Or does he glimpse the holy/eternal in and through, are those starfolk sitting in the air little glints of God, God's little birthday candles maybe?

Is the universe just God's skin?

I might be reading more into this than I should. Hey, maybe I'm smarter than he was, or at least less obscure. But there are things I don't like here, words that may or may not be used for jarring effect: "barn" (barn? Haven't we just travelled to the farthest reaches of the universe? Why use the image of an outbuilding that is basically full of shit?); "shuts" (an awful word, implying "shut-in" and even "shut up!); "spouse", a sort of creaky word referring to one's life partner - oh, that's creepy! Oh, that's creepy! Is he married to Jesus, or his mother? I guess "espouse" can mean just believing in something. Or something.

Or surrendering to it? Oh God. I was never one for surrender, though in certain circles (does the term 12 Step Program mean anything to you?) it's considered the highest achievement.

And that word "hallows" is not one I am comfortable with either - all hallows eve, hallowed be thy name (which for some reason always reminded me of the inside of a pumpkin, that punky smell). So he throws in some language which could not be more at odds with the dazzling fluidity of those first few lines. What of buying, selling, bidding - what's he on about? Maybe it would be better to stop at Line 7. Can the Sunday school lesson; just dazzle us.


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Justin Bieber and Michael Buble have a stupid contest

We don't need Justin Bieber to remind us how inane celebrities can be. Not only that - they actually go on the record with it.

Claiming the legendary holocaust writer Anne Frank would have been a "belieber" (and does anyone under 50 even know who Anne Frank was?) is just the tip of the iceberg. This guy has no street smarts at all and has not thought it through in any area of his life and/or career. Why do I get that sickish creeping feeling that all-too-soon it will do him in?

But soft: what's this? Michael Buble has been around a long time now - he has almost 20 years on Bieber -and he's STILL saying inane, stupid things and everyone goes "selah, amen,  give me a ticket" because he's a "star". 

This is only an excerpt (because I can't stand the whole thing, and besides, this kind of sums it up) from an interview that I found particularly painful. I've got nothing against singers who can mimic a sort of melange of Sinatra, Torme and Vic Damone and bilk seniors out of their pension money. I just wish they'd THINK before they open their cavernous tonsil-baring singer's mouths. 

Singer, songwriter and lifelong ham, Michael Bublé lives his life through music. Through the ups and downs, breakthroughs and breakdowns, the 37-year-old, one of the world’s most recognizable artists and host of Sunday’s Juno Awards, has grown (up), thrown (up) and blown (up) (parentheses mine) to a soundtrack. While pop music fans await the release next week of his new disc To Be Loved, with tunes by artists including Randy Newman and Smokey Robinson, Bublé recounts (one of) the singles that have kept him comfort through his radical changes.

Seasons in the Sun, Terry Jacks, 1993

“I’d turned 18 and was working on my father’s commercial salmon fishing boat and we’d sing that old Terry Jacks song. At that time, I wasn’t thinking about melody or voice, I was having fun. We’d sing: ‘We had joy/we had fun/we had salmons up our bum/but the pain was too strong/because the salmon was too long.’ I thought that was hilarious — salmons up our bum! It was silly and stupid, but what do you expect? I was 19.”


(Salmons? Is that sort of like trouts or basses or pikes, or other assorted fishes?)

On his other interest, family life: 

 “Even though I’m in love with my new record, I have bigger fish to fry. In a few months, I’ll be a first-time dad and that means everything. I’ve waited my whole life for this and when I see my wife next, the first thing I’ll do is sing to her belly with my little boy or girl in there. ”

Boy salmons or girl salmons?

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True confessions: is fiction really fiction?

So how much of "me" is in these stories? My three readers want to know (or not). Sometimes, *I* want to know, myself.

It's hard to unwind, unplait the strands of what actually happened (which is sometimes hard enough to decipher) and what was woven and knitted up to fill the gaps and holes. But it's never made up out of whole cloth. How can anyone write except through their own perceptions? These strenuous denials by authors who insist NONE of their real life ever spills over into their work are pure bullshit.

I think it's the rushing groundwater of emotion that always floods through, the rampaging cascades that dominate all our lives, whether we want to admit it or not. My work is emotionally driven, and sometimes I think the fiction I've presented here is nothing but "reaction", a character squirming and writhing and squirting squid ink in distress. (And that's another thing. What is a story? A story is something going wrong. If everything went right in a story it would be a crashing bore, and not even a story because nothing would happen. Is the same true in what we so chucklingly call "real life"?)

I've always had the impulse, even the need to "make story", but it's rare that I can keep my careening emotions and hairtrigger reactions out of it. The first novel I tried to write - it makes me wince now - I guess I thought it was publishable because I sent it to 65 publishers, and nobody would give me the time of day. Most didn't even read the manuscript but hated the outline so much that they immediately fired off a form rejection, with all the force of that cow being fired over the castle wall in Monty Python's Holy Grail. I finally understand why (I read about half a page of it recently and mentally barfed), but what scares me is that at the time I was SURE it was great and was going to get published and make me famous.

It was too much about me, probably, my wretched reactions, though the characters were either totally manufactured or heavily disguised. Each character narrated their part in first person, a technique which is as deadly as a ferret latching on to your jugular. So: failure, but other things came of it. A very wise writer once said to me, "When you're sending out your first novel, make sure you're writing your second one." This was advice that saved my life.

When I wrote Better than Life, I wasn't in it, not really, but so many of my ancestors were: they were given a twist of course, but the essence was there, all these half-cracked Irish people feuding and drinking and generally carrying on. And it worked. Took a while to sell it, but someone wanted it. What happened? Did it improve the novel's chances that I wasn't "in it"? 

I have had the experience of becoming so desperately in thrall to writing a novel that I felt like I was being dragged behind a wild horse. This was exhilarating and frightening, and though there were (I suppose) some good ideas in it, I reread it now and shudder a bit. What was happening to me then? I wasn't eating or sleeping much, and my thoughts sometimes became very peculiar. Strangely enough, I do not believe I am in that one at all, not even remotely. It's all about people living in the Downtown Eastside, and I've never been near those circumstances. Nor did I show up in the next one, The Glass Character, though I think I identify with the main character (who is not, after all, Harold Lloyd, but a woman named Muriel Ashford who is so obsessed with him that nowadays we might say she was stalking him). 

The emotions, the blissful agonies of obsession are things I know too, too well. I have lived over half my life in my imagination. I don't know why this is and it isn't enjoyable and it isn't even "creative", unless we're talking about Dylan Thomas' frightening view of creativity:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
drives my green age
That blasts the roots of trees
is my destroyer

Yes, and other things: reading about the wretched genius Oscar Levant (speaking of obsessions - we WERE speaking of obsessions, weren't we?), I came across a couple of quotes that I've filed away with the good ones: "What makes you, unmakes you," playwright George S. Kaufman stated, and Clifford Odets, victim of an Orson-Wellesian too-early success, added this thought: "Success is the jinni (genie) that kills."

Yes. Gives you three wishes, grants them, then utterly destroys you. Or is it this way? It's granting the wishes that kills you, like someone poor and illiterate winning 6-49. Or is it the wishing itself, the scrambling around for something "better" and never being satisfied with what you have? Is it the human agony of always wanting? Of consuming, of eating and buying and taking in and taking in, hungry, hungry, always hungry? Why can't we rest, why can't we just be? All this meditation crap is just playing at stillness. We'd have to stop breathing to really be still. 

So we are left with the maelstrom, the bucking and heaving, the scrambling and never having, as years pour through our hands and the ground dies under our feet.


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Sacrificial lamb (short fiction)

May 24, 2013

This is The Day, but I don’t feel like celebrating it. I just feel like kicking my life into the gutter. There seems to be nothing to celebrate but rancor, unresolved issues and chronic pain.

I am completely fed up by the last “episode” which happened yesterday. I’ve been thinking of giving Carol a gag gift for her birthday (on Monday – we’re babysitting the grandkids then). I thought of designing and knitting a doll that looked like her, but had no luck and turned it into something else.

Then I thought: Desiree has been nagging and nagging her to get a dog (and she hates dogs), so what if I did her a little dog? I’ll tell you, it was one of the hardest and fiddliest things I ever tried. I went through 3 different patterns and once I settled on one, threw 2 nearly-finished ones out. Had to go to Michaels to find some wool I could use, even though I am drowning in wool and have bins and bins of it. It was all extremely expensive and not suitable.

Plus would an executive like her want a little knitted dog? She isn’t the type to put it on her desk. Hardly. And she doesn’t want to be reminded of her mother, does she, how she sits there and knits all day when she could have made something of herself?

Well, maybe Desiree would adopt it. She likes dogs. So finally yesterday I made something I thought was OK, but put it aside, thinking, I probably won’t give it to Carol. Then (typical of me, never giving up when I know I should), this morning I got up and thought, hmm, it’s really not so bad (a sane person would have thrown it out, probably) and began to personalize it, giving it features, perked ears and a long tail, collar and tag, etc. I truly believe that my persistence is the worst trait I have because it never leads to anything good.

When I was finished, or at least I thought it was finished, I told Roy I was going to give it to Carol as a gag birthday gift (I'd been talking about making her a dog for weeks) and asked him, “what do you think?” He looked at it for a while, then said, “It could be one of two things. A small bear or a lamb."

A lamb, a fucking lamb! With a collar and tag and a long black tail. I was just so bloody upset after all that hard work, told him I was going to throw it out, headed over to the garbage pail, grabbed the scissors to eviscerate it, then he started saying things like “You’re crazy!” 

I couldn’t believe Mr. Wonderful and Perfect would say such a thing. For me, it’s the worst there is. It’s like saying, “it doesn’t matter how much hard work and effort you’ve put in over years and years to try to get your life back on track after a horrendous mental breakdown that nearly destroyed you. YOU’RE CRAZY.” This is exactly what my sister (the most vindictive human being I have ever had the misfortune of encountering) used to say to me when she really wanted to twist the knife. My sister, the one who used to invite me to those drunken adult parties and could not understand why I wasn’t “grateful”.

No one, but no one can begin to fathom the loneliness of a mental breakdown, the long, long wilderness walk, so often stumbling and falling on my face, the utter disgrace of the hospital, the guilt and filth in my soul that can never be washed clean. As long as I “act normal” I am more or less OK, but routinely, at intervals, I must have “you’re crazy!” hurled at me by the person who loves me best in the whole wide world. To keep me in line, I suppose.

It almost works.

Even though he is basically an asshole, it always ends up with Roy acting like he is the Saint, the one who “puts up with” this banshee of a woman, this crazy woman who actually has EMOTIONS and doesn’t keep it all inside like she is supposed to, who sometimes just boils over, and “why would that be?” Then he comes out with “you ALWAYS say that,” “it doesn’t matter what I say, you always yell at me, I’m always wrong,” etc. He does not know how many times in the course of the day I bite my tongue just to keep the peace and to keep him from putting on his martyr routine. Honestly, I wonder if I walked out or just died, how long would it take before he even noticed? He would have to find some other instrument for feeling constantly wronged and hurt without any provocation whatsoever, so maybe he’d miss THAT. He’d miss being crowned the Saint every day.

These are the things that never get solved, and they come up again and again. No use “trying to explain it to him” as I’ve been told to do 100 times, how much it hurts me for him to say these things. He pulls them out and uses them again and again because he knows damn well it is the worst thing he can possibly say to me. I always felt if we went into marriage counselling we’d just walk away from each other, as too many things would be dragged up from his side, i. e. putting up with my “craziness” for 40 years. (I’d know enough to keep my mouth shut. Mental patients have no rights.) I try to get past it and finally have to let it go because there’s nothing I can do about it.

How is marriage supposed to be? Nobody tells you, any more than they tell you how to be a mother. You just flail around and hope for the best and try not to kill each other. I think people think: hey, he doesn’t drink or smoke or screw around, so why can’t you be happy? This is as good as you will ever do. What's the matter, aren't you grateful?

Now I really don’t know whether I should give my daughter what I made for her, that lamb or bear or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, knowing her propensity for zingers. I certainly don’t need any more of THOSE in my life. I just want to show her I care about her. We aren’t a very demonstrative family and the very rare time I hug Carol, she stiffens like a tree trunk.

A LAMB. Oh yes, I’d be giving her a baby lamb for her birthday, that makes a lot of sense! I might as well play the tape right now, of she and her husband denigrating it when they’re alone. Yet, strangely, after all that work and effort I don’t want to throw it away or give it to someone else. I know she believes that I have basically wasted my life and spend all my time knitting and making stuffed animals. It’s as if she sucked all the ambition and achievement out of me and used it for her own purposes.

Anyway, today at this moment I am reminded of Sylvia Fraser calling families “killing fields”. They are all I have and I feel so poorly equipped to handle any of it, so I just go along with everything and when I do explode, I am “crazy”. They should live inside my skin for ONE day and see how easy it is.

So today, we are 40 years old and I regret every goddamn minute of it. If I had a loaded gun, I wouldn’t trust myself in the same room with him. My life partner, the one who has endured me for all this time and put up with my incessant craziness and the fact I don’t contribute anything to the marriage at all.

Happy anniversary.

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T. H. E. Cat

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Milky-abilia: the archaeological dig

Everybody knew that Milky the Clown was in the dairy business. I suppose it could have been worse, but what do we really know about these Twin Pines guys (posing here with His Milks himself)? The girl is sweet enough, and her pleated skirt reads, "Mary Lou". Pierre (with a giant TP on his turtleneck, presumably for Twin Pines) is wielding what looks like an enormous loaf of French bread (but at least he's not wearing a beret). The friendly milkman is just that - the friendly milkman, the same kind of milkman I knew as a child with his glass bottles clinking away. Except that when I was a kid, the milk was delivered by horse and wagon.

Amazingly, these little hand-held games can still be had on eBay. It's sort of like a maze where you have to get little balls in the holes. They were given out as prizes on Milky's Party Time, in which they had a feature called Stars of the Future (baton-twirling, juggling, etc.) This was as forerunner of America's Got Talent.

Closeup view.

I don't know why this is posed on snakeskin. Looks a little ominous to me. I should look up the price on eBay.

Milky on a (milk) glass. Looks plastic, but they didn't really have plastic glasses back then. Cheers!

Milky's Fan Club official button. I never was a member, not much of a joiner.

Yes, you're seeing this right. It's a Milky the Clown ashtray. The little beggars had already seen Fred and Wilma Flintstone sucking on Winstons, so what harm could it do?

Then again, maybe it's a hoax, like my Scully and Mulder fridge magnet in the shape of a flower.


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SMACKDOWN: Battle of the Creepy Clowns!

OK, I KNOW I post too many gifs. I'm of an older generation that still thinks they're Magic, and besides, I've learned how to make my own from YouTube snippets. And I'm bored and it's Friday and so what. If you don't like these, and you probably don't, don't look at them. Though my view count is at an all-time low, I am not the kind of social media prostitute that froths up business by wagging her ass. There, I've said. it.

This is Krinkles the Klown shilling for some cereal. Maybe he had aspirations beyond prancing around in a polka-dotted suit and wearing a doghouse on his head. He is plenty creepy and his makeup is classic clown, but the problem is, besides breaking through a big piece of paper, he doesn't DO much.

Milky, now. He was the bane of my childhood and star of his own show, Milky's Party Time. Like Krinkles, he was flogging a corporation, Twin Pines Dairy. Only one rare clip survives, showing him pulling a large object like a tumor out of  Little Nancy's face. Then he seems to shove it back into her face again, which I like. The clip is from some benefit for "crippled children", which is why poor Nancy must stand there on crutches for twenty minutes or so instead of sitting down comfortably. Milky looks like some ghastly vision of Pagliaccio, ready to slay his rival with a butcher knife. His costume has always reminded me, most disturbingly, of the KKK.

Like I said, Krinkles mainly just sits there and talks. He talks about how the cereal makes him "krinkle". I wonder if he is some strange forerunner of Krusty on The Simpsons. And there's that damned ruffle again.

I just noticed this (after 50 years): what's that on his head? A funnel with a sort of handle on it, I guess.

This is where it gets WAY weird, the thing with the sausages. He keeps rummaging around in his pants for some reason. When you look at some of the body language (i. e. his face getting closer and closer to the sausage, which is provocatively curved), you can see this is something that would not be considered appropriate today. And boy, is Nancy getting tired! It must hurt under her arms. And let's hope Milky's breath isn't too bad. Circus performers are notorious for their booze-and-tobacco fumes.

Ah, the taste test! How many takes did it require? He may have chewed his way through a few boxes of that stuff. But wait! Can you really SEE the spoon? Is he (like Milky) a genius at sleight-of-hand and thus able to ram the spoon into his clowny white face with no cereal on it? If so, unlike Milky, he wouldn't have to put anything in his mouth at all.

Would you want this clown pulling sausages out of your child's ear? You can sit down now, Nancy.

POST-POST: In my haste to present these macabre magicians in all their frightening glory, I forgot the most important thing.

WHO WON??

Which clown was the vilest, the scariest, the most sinister? Who pulled the most incomprehensible pranks on poor unsuspecting children?

I didn't even need to count your votes.

I give you. . .  The Victor.

I have put together this merry montage to express my personal feelings about Milky. Now for a few candid shots. . .

Milky enjoys the finer things.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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

Big Bang, little fizzle

I have completely lost the text to this. What a horrible feeling. It just. . . went away. What I was GOING to say is that this reminds me of some bizarre experiment on The Big Bang Theory. We have contests at our house about the theme song: how fast you can sing it, word-perfect. So, sigh, here are the words:

Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started - wait -
The earth began to cool, the autotrophes began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools, we built a wall
(We built the pyramids!)
Math, science, history
Unravelling the mystery
That all started with a big bang
BANG!!!

I get stuck on "developed" (invented?) and "unravelling" (examining?). Who cares anyway? There's no prize.

It's Friday and I lost my text and hardly anyone reads this shit anyway, so why don't I just quit?

P. S. this only gets interesting around 1:27. Before that it's all setup.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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