Sorry, Harold. I can't afford this picture. But it would be nice. And I'm glad your handsome face still commands such a handsome price.
HAROLD LLOYD - INSCRIBED PHOTOGRAPH SIGNED
Seller information
Item condition:
Sunday, November 17, 2013
I'd buy it, if I could afford it
Sorry, Harold. I can't afford this picture. But it would be nice. And I'm glad your handsome face still commands such a handsome price.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
Insane Jane and other medieval horrors
http://socialmediasatisfied.com/movember-mental-illness-and-my-sons-battle-with-ocd-and-depression/
About all I can say is that the above article about a woman's valiant struggle to find help for her son is heartbreaking, and too true. We are still in the dark ages when it comes to mental illness. We avoid, look away and nervously change the subject. We don't help, so afraid we'll say "the wrong thing" that we say nothing at all. Or, perhaps worse, try to fix it: "Here, read this book, it's saving my life." "Dr. Oz says it's nutritional." And so on.
It's true, no one comes to help or bakes brownies or any of the stuff they do when someone breaks a leg. Breaking a leg is a day at the beach compared to this stuff. Feeling alone and, in particular, feeling ashamed, being sure it's your fault, is the worst thing of all. But if no one comes to visit, isn't that the message, isn't that what they're telling you without words?
There are certain "helpful" phrases which kill: "Why don't you just" and "can't you just" being among the worst. "Just" has nothing to do with an intractible brain disorder or a deep conviction that your life is worth nothing. And it implies that you're lazing around not doing anything about your problem simply because you lack motivation. "Just" implies simplicity and even ease, and if you don't see it that way, you obviously need it pointed out to you "for your own good".
I have nothing more to say about this, except that people should WISE UP and stop being such insensitive assholes and get with reality: mental illness can happen in ANY family, it's not a disgrace, and people in this situation need support and understanding and compassion more than anyone else in the world.
Enough said? Of course not, but I'll stop now because I am very, very tired.
POST-BLOG comment: These are ads are for widely-available "mental patient" costumes for Halloween. Nobody seems to question them or even notice them. It's a joke, apparently: don't you have a sense of humor? These folks are funny, aren't they?
I've seen them, along with a mockup of a "mental hospital" in my neighbor's front yard. Accompanying it was a sign: DANGER! ESCAPED LUNATIC! I wonder why we don't see any Parkinson's costumes, or MS "fancy dress" costumes, complete with bloody straightjacket and axe. But these conditions aren't horror-movie stuff, and I guess "craziness" is. Society retains a medieval dread and horror of old-style mental institutions, like something out of Amadeus, but meanwhile people with mental illness have been turned out on the street with NO support of any kind, not even minimal shelter or food. The thinking seems to be: if we treat them as if they don't have an illness, then they will ACT as if they don't have an illness. Once more, society has its head up its ass so far it can't see the light of day.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Animal hybrids: monsters in the making
I know, I realize I shouldn't get into these things, these creepy things, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl and also make me realize that humanity has no idea what it's doing.
What awfuls me out about this short video isn't the mammoth size of this freak animal, nor even the casual way they putter around him in total denial that he could kill them with one swipe of his gigantic paw. No doubt they think he's "sweet", no doubt they think he's "tame", no doubt they call him one of their "babies" (an ever-present symptom of the malignant disease of keeping exotic animals as pets).
I want to write more about this whole mess later, when I get a chance to see a documentary called The Elephant in the Living Room. I saw the last half of it on National Geographic Channel and spent the half-hour with my mouth open.
The cases in this documentary weren't the worst, but they were bad enough. Keeping exotic animals as pets often goes completely unregulated, sometimes with disastrous results. It wasn't just the utter degradation of seeing glorious jungle animals kept in wire cages (with one male lion slowly, agonizingly electrocuted by faulty wiring on a freezer): it was the emotional abyss at the core of the people who were keeping these "babies". "He's like my son," claimed the lion's owner before the disaster,"one of my kids." Why is it I have this feeling his real children never tapped his heart in the same profound way?
All that unfathomable sickness aside, I soon got on to the topic of animal hybrids and was pretty astonished at what I found. Astonished, and freaked out. There has been an awful lot of tampering going on behind our backs: I didn't realize the well-known liger is three times the size of a normal lion, weighing close to a thousand pounds and resembling some prehistoric beast on an unimagineable scale. All this has been engineered, folks - we made it happen - and we made it happen without the slightest knowledge or concern that the resultant creature would be so grotesquely proportioned.
From the liger and the smaller tigon, often afflicted by dwarfism (not that such an insignificant thing will stop them from being bred), I fell into the dusky world of the wolf dog, which some people own for the same reason they'd get their bodies tattoed over every square inch: look, I'm a social rebel, I own a dog that's half-wolf! Look, I take a huge risk every time I take him out of the wire cage!
Does anyone stop to think what is going on in the mind and biology of an animal that has been created from spare parts, cobbled together in God-knows-what sort of way just on a human whim? Might there be some sort of internal conflict at the most fundamental level? Might that animal not know who he/she is? Or are those kinds of concerns not on the table, so long as we satisfy our "let's try this and see what happens" impulse?
Oh, but it got worse, a lot worse! Zebroids, including a zorse, a zonkey, and a zony. A cama, fusing together two species that are, well, close enough, aren't they? Except the llama genes seem to cancel out the camel's hump. But who needs a hump anyway?
When I came to the grolar or pizzly, I began to feel sick outright. But bears are bears, aren't they? Does it even matter if they're brown or white? Then why do I feel so nauseated? Never mind that these grotesque and ridiculous names insult their animal dignity and wouldn't even suit a toy. Hey, the leopon is just a spotty lion, right? And the wolphin. . .
I stop at the wolphin. I stop at the wolphin because I know whales and dolphins are so intelligent, and I honestly wonder what sort of genetic clash might make these sea geniuses go completely mad.
What set all this off - I mean, after the National Geographic documentary, which I have ordered on a DVD - was stumbling upon something that nearly made my hair stand on end: the humanzee. I didn't like to think that it was possible, that we've come that far, that we might just want to try this out for a lark or out of scientific curiosity: but haven't we been told over and over again how genetically close we are to chimps?
This is a weird story that has been officially discounted, and now that I look at it a little more objectively I can see why. A couple claimed to have captured a baby chimp "in the wild" in 1960. Oliver had some pretty strange traits, the strangest being walking upright without the weird staggering gait of most chimps. He also had a strange-looking face, hairless and sort of flat, though hardly human. His ears creeped me out however, as they didn't look like chimp ears at all. They looked like human ears that had been grafted on.
Other chimps shunned Oliver, who seemed to prefer human company (and even mounted his owner's wife, causing them to eventually sell him). He smelled different, not like a normal chimp. These were all little question marks that added up to a very big one: did Oliver have human genes, and if so, how had this happened?
Back in 1960, the assumption was that some man had had sex with a female chimp "in the wild", the chimp had become pregnant, and little upright-walking, flat-faced Oliver was the result. He quickly became a sensation, dressed up in a tux and encouraged to smoke and drink for the crowd. This reflected the hilarity of the times upon witnessing animals "acting like humans". (Remember the Marquis Chimps on Ed Sullivan? I hope you don't.)
But a funny thing happened on the way to fame. People lost interest. The whole thing looked a little bogus. Oliver was sold again and again, each time falling a little deeper into the hole, and ending up in a small square wire cage in a laboratory.
Decades later, Oliver's original owner (perhaps wondering if there was more money to be made) tracked him down and eventually settled him into one of those chimp retirement homes. He didn't walk upright any more - too much trouble - and by this time he just looked like an old chimp, a very relieved old chimp, relieved he didn't have to wear a tux, smoke cigars and drink brandy for the crowd. He died only a couple of weeks ago, in fact, probably about 55 years old. Certainly he had served his time.
But it hangs in the air, doesn't it - weirdly, and sickeningly. Camas, pizzlys, zorses and wolphins. Whynot humanzees? At the end of his life Oliver was genetically tested, and it was officially announced that he was "100% chimpanzee", so that was that. (If he hadn't been, what would they have said? The genie would be out of the bottle for sure.)
But I had a funny feeling about it all. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago and, by God, now it is not only possible but bloody well likely we could do such a thing, "cross" a chimp with a human and come up with a whole new sort of species.
At the embryonic level, this has already been attempted and perhaps even accomplished. We want stem cells and new organs and all that sort of thing, necessary spare parts salvaged from throwaways, and we don't seem to care how much we ravage the natural balance in order to get them.
But an actual humanzee, a hybrid? Is it illegal? Would it be funded? Who cares. Money comes. It follows curiosity. I am beginning to get this sick feeling, this prickly feeling that we're going to see this, and sooner than we think. The trouble is, no one will know what to do with this wretched thing, this product of strands of DNA twisted horribly wrong: kill it now? Watch it suffer, or, perhaps worse, thrive?
What will it look like? Can you see it in your mind? Will it maybe resemble its human parent: "Doesn't little Johnny look just like his Dad"? Will it walk upright like Oliver, or scooch around on its knuckles and swing from the trees? Talk, perhaps? Have thoughts, opinions, needs? But who cares about needs at a time like this: who thinks of needs except OUR needs, our whims, our wretched inability to leave things alone and appreciate a fragile, unforgiveably damaged wild world that is committing suicide right in front of our eyes.
Order The Glass Character from:
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Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Don't Mess with Mr. In-Between: Bob Dylan's very first performance
OK, I finally won this battle, the battle to find an excerpt I remembered from one of the many biographies of Bob Dylan. Dylan was maybe my first hero/crush, and as a teenager I worshipped him. Images from his songs still pop into my head, and I marvel at them and realize I will never write anything that good ("Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. . .").
I had this excerpt in mind from a book called Down the Highway by somebody-or-other Sounes. I don't remember if I reviewed it or not during my endless career as a literary critic (during which I covered about 350 titles for the Montreal Gazette, Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, and various lit mags), or bought it. At that point I wasn't buying many books because an online mag I was writing for was presenting me with truckloads of books they didn't want. After a while I didn't want them either, so I became a sort of storage depot. But this Dylan book, I can't find it anywhere, not in my shelves of review copies (which I have always kept segregated in chronological order, probably because at the time they were the only identity I had as a writer and I was afraid of disappearing), or anywhere in my own collection, though I did find THREE other Dylan bios: the first one written by Anthoony Scaduto, a spiral-bound galley proof called Behind the Shades, and Chronicles, Dylan's first attempt at a memoir.
But soft! What's this? All I had to google was Bob Dylan Accentuate the Positive, and lo! This came up. I am sure it is in the public domain cuzzadafact that it was sitting there on the internet, just a-sittin' there saying "take me".
So I found it: the record of Bob Dylan's very first musical performance. As a child, he seems to have been unusually self-possessed. His parents seem loving, even devoted. One would expect horrible abuse, alcoholism, etc., but there was none of that. Perhaps that's why he's still around, tough as an old dandelion root.
The central hillside district of Duluth was predominantly Jewish and Polish, with a synagogue at the end of the road. There was a general store, a European bakery, the Loiselle liquor store, and a Sears Roebuck at the bottom of the hill. The weather was determined by Lake Superior, so vast and deep it remained icy cold throughout the year. Even in mid-summer, Duluth could be shrouded in frigid fog. There was a fresh ocean smell and the cry of seagulls. Ships approaching the landmark Ariel Bridge sounded their horns and a horn on the bridge blasted in reply. These were the sights and sounds Bob grew up with as the Second World War raged to its end.
In 1946, a year after the war ended, Bob enrolled at the Nettleton elementary school two blocks from his home. The same year he gave his singing debut at a family party. Children were encouraged to perform for the entertainment of the adults. When it was his turn, four-year-old Bob stamped his foot for attention. "If everybody in this room will keep quiet," he said. "I will sing for my grandmother. I'm going to sing `Some Sunday Morning.'" It was such a success the audience demanded an encore. Bob obliged with "Accentuate the Positive." These were popular tunes on the radio at the time. "Our phone never stopped ringing with people congratulating me," said the proud Beatty.
Not long after, Bob had a second opportunity to perform, at the wedding of Beatty's sister, Irene. The relatives wanted Bob to sing again. Bob was reluctant, even when an uncle offered him money, but Abe persuaded him. Once again he prefaced his performance by telling the excited relatives, "If it's quiet, I will sing." It was another great success. Everybody cheered and clapped and one of Bob's uncles pressed money into his hand. With instinctive showmanship, Bob turned to his mother and said, "Mummy, I'm going to give the money back." It brought the house down. "People would laugh with delight at heating him sing. He was, I would say, a very lovable, a very unusual child," Abe remembered. "I think we were the only ones who would not agree that he was going to be a very famous person some day ... When he sang `Accentuate the Positive' the way other children his age sang `Mary Had a Little Lamb' people said he was brilliant." As Beatty said, it was amazing her son was not spoiled by so much attention.
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http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
Monday, November 11, 2013
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Why my husband is NOT my best friend
BLOGGER'S NOTE. I am not ashamed to say that this is a repeat. I just can't keep feeding this insatiable monster, not with my mind so embroiled in completing the final edit for my new novel, The Glass Character (soon to be a major motion picture - oops, not yet, but it's soon to be published by Thistledown Press in spring 2014). What I wrote then, I believe now.
So, OK. . . what's on the top of my head today? I'm not halfway through my enormous Starbuck's mug yet, so who knows how coherent it will be, but several ideas have been forming like baby icebergs in my brain, waiting to calve.
I have been married for 40 years, to the same person I mean, and as with a lot of life's more arcane mysteries, I can't really talk about it. I've attempted to write about our relationship before, either in this blog or "that other one", the Open Salon experiment that backfired so badly.
So I won't write about it except to say a few things, maybe dispell a few cliches. If you read this at all, and let's hope somebody does, you'll realize I keep yammering away at certain themes: horses, Anthony Perkins, Harold Lloyd, frustration as an author, etc. But it's the cliches that really get down my neck, chief among them "everything happens for a reason" (with a side of "God never gives us more than we can handle").
These sayings are idiotic in my mind, because there are murders, disasters, jihads, planes flying into towers, world wars, child murders, and all manner of things that happen for no reason at all, except perhaps human stupidity and indifference. And as far as good o'l God seeing to it that we aren't overburdened, as a friend of mine likes to say, "our prisons and mental hospitals are full of people who had more than they could handle".Amen.
So what do we attack today? So to speak. I hear this phrase all the time: "My husband is my best friend." I have never felt that way about my husband, and I will tell you why.
I have a best friend already. That's part of it. To her, I can tell all the woman-stuff that guys, sorry about that, just don't getand won't get in a million years because of their hormonal structure and brain physiology.
So if I already have one, how can my husband be my best friend? To me, the term implies a buddy-buddy-ness, being there to listen on the phone when you lose that promotion, walking along the beach skipping stones together or sitting in Starbuck's over a double caramelized Machiavelli, just gabbing away.
We don't do that.
It also implies, to me, sexlessness. I'm not saying we're Romeo and Juliet, but our marriage is not sexless and never has been.
Saying "my husband is my best friend" is supposed to be totally positive, but to me it's totally weird if you really look at it (and that's the thing: how many people LOOK at it?). It's like roommates who really get along and even do each other's laundry in a pinch. (He does his own laundry, by the way - always has - it's why we're still married.) So if we aren't best friends, what are we?
The other one is "soul-mate". I don't know about that one either: I dislike like it for reasons that are hard to articulate. It just doesn't hit the mark, and maybe nothing can. My husband is my husband, and occupies a unique place in my life and has occupied that place for the vast majority of my life (since I was ten when I got married - one of those cultural betrothal things). He is my life partner, the father of my children and grandfather to my precious grandkids. And guess what: a best friend doesn't do that.
"Friend" is great, it's wonderful, but it only goes so far. When you're in the trenches together for nearly 40 years, you find out about the deeper levels of commitment that most people seem to ignore.
There are three of them, actually. Everyone goes on and on about commitment, and it's fine. But you can be committed to a dog, a job, a fitness plan. Will that be enough to keep the bond strong as life's hurricanes blast you out of your chair?
No.
The next level, as I see it, is devotion. Great-sounding word, isn't it - and a leap beyond commitment in emotional content. But is it enough to stay married?
Double-no.
The third level is one that doesn't even occur to people, and I call it covenant. In case you think I'm going all religious on you, let me define it now:
cov·e·nant [kuhv-uh-nuh
nt] 
Show IPA
The next level, as I see it, is devotion. Great-sounding word, isn't it - and a leap beyond commitment in emotional content. But is it enough to stay married?
Double-no.
The third level is one that doesn't even occur to people, and I call it covenant. In case you think I'm going all religious on you, let me define it now:
cov·e·nant [kuhv-uh-nuh
nt] Show IPA
noun
1.
an agreement, usually formal, between two or more persons todo or not do something specified.
2.
Law . an incidental clause in such an agreement.
3.
Ecclesiastical . a solemn agreement between the members of achurch to act together in harmony with the precepts of thegospel.
4.
( initial capital letter ) History/Historical .
) History/Historical .
5.
Bible .
a.
the conditional promises made to humanity by God, as revealedin Scripture.
b.
But the truth is, as people sign that register and smile their faces off, they don't really think that they have signed on for the long haul.
Remember how it goes? Forsaking all others; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. . . so long as you both shall live.
If you think it sounds cold to define marriage as a covenant/contractual agreement, then why do people still insist on it? A few decades ago, the prediction was that legal marriage would become completely obsolete by the year 2000 (always named as the watershed year when absolutely everything would change). People would just live together, or if they married at all the marriages would be loose agreements with lots of escape clauses built in, based on the concept of "serial monogamy" (which still exists: it's called a pre-nup).
Most of us don't have prenups unless we're George Clooney or something, and last time I checked, I wasn't. So OK, why has marriage become more popular than ever, with crazed brides stampeding each other to upstage their girl friends and nab the perfect virginal white gown? On one level at least, it has to do with the kids. Raising kids can be brutal, and it's long and it's very expensive. "Commitment" won't do it. This isn't a Dalmation. Even devotion might wobble and collapse in the storm.
So we're back to that old, creaky, Moses-esque concept of covenant, because it has been the glue in profound human attachments for millennia. Can I step out? OK, it's just my girl friend, she'll never notice. Oops, wait a minute. . . she's my wife. Not only that, she's the mother of my kids, who just happen to have my name on them.
We won't go into the ramifications of last names right now, except to say that the awkward double-barrelled name seems to have trickled away in popularity. (Think of it: the next generation would have four names, the one after that eight. . . It just doesn't work.) Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, that "little piece of paper" people used to scorn is about as unimportant as the Magna Carta and other little pieces of paper that have made a bit of difference over the years.The bits of paper that have changed the course of human history.
We signed on the dotted line all those years ago, and during those inevitable stormy times when it looked like we might be over, one or the other of us would say: wait a minute. Let's wait it out, work at it for just a little bit longer.
the agreement between God and the ancient Israelites, in whichGod promised to protect them if they kept His law and werefaithful to Him.
OK, I see where this is going all Biblical, and that puts people off. But what I'm trying to say is: you don't sign a contract with your best friend, unless you happen to be business partners. You don't even sign a contract with your soul-mate, as a general rule.
Marriage is legal. It's something that holds up in a court of law. Most people seal this covenant in a public setting, often very elaborately and expensively, as if to show off the intensity and sincerity of the covenant (though more often, it's the elaborateness of the trappings, including the supposedly-virginal white wedding gown. This ubiquitous bridezilla-mania represents a return to a deeply sexist tradition that makes my hair stand on end).
But the truth is, as people sign that register and smile their faces off, they don't really think that they have signed on for the long haul.
Remember how it goes? Forsaking all others; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health. . . so long as you both shall live.
If you think it sounds cold to define marriage as a covenant/contractual agreement, then why do people still insist on it? A few decades ago, the prediction was that legal marriage would become completely obsolete by the year 2000 (always named as the watershed year when absolutely everything would change). People would just live together, or if they married at all the marriages would be loose agreements with lots of escape clauses built in, based on the concept of "serial monogamy" (which still exists: it's called a pre-nup).
Most of us don't have prenups unless we're George Clooney or something, and last time I checked, I wasn't. So OK, why has marriage become more popular than ever, with crazed brides stampeding each other to upstage their girl friends and nab the perfect virginal white gown? On one level at least, it has to do with the kids. Raising kids can be brutal, and it's long and it's very expensive. "Commitment" won't do it. This isn't a Dalmation. Even devotion might wobble and collapse in the storm.
So we're back to that old, creaky, Moses-esque concept of covenant, because it has been the glue in profound human attachments for millennia. Can I step out? OK, it's just my girl friend, she'll never notice. Oops, wait a minute. . . she's my wife. Not only that, she's the mother of my kids, who just happen to have my name on them.
We won't go into the ramifications of last names right now, except to say that the awkward double-barrelled name seems to have trickled away in popularity. (Think of it: the next generation would have four names, the one after that eight. . . It just doesn't work.) Suffice it to say that, in my opinion, that "little piece of paper" people used to scorn is about as unimportant as the Magna Carta and other little pieces of paper that have made a bit of difference over the years.The bits of paper that have changed the course of human history.
Why are we still together? I only have one husband, and he occupies a unique position in my life. To say he's some sort of patriarchal figure would be completely inaccurate, except for his innate need to be protective in his love.
We signed on the dotted line all those years ago, and during those inevitable stormy times when it looked like we might be over, one or the other of us would say: wait a minute. Let's wait it out, work at it for just a little bit longer.
We're not best friends. We're married. Still married. And somehow, as intimate and exclusive as we are with each other, the marriage is part of a much bigger picture, a network or matrix of kids and grandkids, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and other people we probably wouldn't be able to stand otherwise. And may I say this? Marriage is the basic social unit of society, a whole lot of interlocking puzzle pieces of people at least making an attempt at commitment to living in a manner based on love. Or devotion.
Or that which lies beyond devotion, and always will.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
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