Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Ghomeshi trial: this handful of slime



























As the song says: I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to write a blog post commenting on the Jian Ghomeshi assault trial, and the testimony and subsequent crucifixion of one brave woman who stepped forward to point at him and cry, "J'accuse!"

Not because I'm not interested. Hardly that. It's the queasy impression I have that a great grasping hand has burrowed down into the depths of our sick misogynist culture and pulled up a vast, dripping, rotten clump of slime with hate-formed creatures writhing around in it like those nightmarish little figures from Hieronymus Bosch.

That's why.

But I've read things in the news, seen things on TV, and read posts on Facebook lately that have turned me as white as a ghost.  

 Now that this seething clump has been dredged from the depths(before it is pushed back down again - which is what always happens, or we would not still be in this horrible mess), the contentious issue is the fact that at least one of Ghomeshi's victims maintained contact with him after he assaulted her. Flirtatious contact, in the form of teasingly sexual emails and bikini shots sent via Instagram. 




This leads to another issue poking out its slimy little head: why don't people consider that emails always leave a trail, and that "delete" means nothing when the police can easily crack the memory depths of any computer? In the case of Lucy De Coutere, that lack of awareness (obviously extending to her lawyer) led directly to disaster. It gave Ghomeshi's lawyer the opportunity to savage and humiliate her by forcing her to read these emails (now considered "incriminating" - not that SHE is on trial here!) out loud.
 It didn't look good for her, and I will admit it does not sit well with me that she sent titillating photos and expressed a desire to "fuck his brains out". But I think I have a tiny inkling of what this was about.

Ghomeshi held all the cards here because he had such power in the media. His radio persona was seductive and "cool", which is highly unusual in this country. The media courted him, lionized him, and used him to do things like host the Gillers (though I can't think of one person who is less qualified) in a desperate attempt to make the Canadian image seem less stodgy and out of date, and perhaps to reduce the average age of CBC Radio listeners from, say, 73 to 37. This was in full knowledge that he was abusive, disrespectful, and a misogynist asshole, a man-boy holding sway over his own personal fiefdom. He habitually abused the system and exploited the people in it, but did that stop them from going back and sucking up to him for more favours? I mean, again and again and again?




There may have been a sense that it was some kind of dubious honour for women if he was interested in them, at least until he tired of them in a few weeks or months. (Ghomeshi has never been known to have any sort of lasting relationship with women, except perhaps his mother.) This does not mean all these women were stupid or weak. They may have been sucked in, but media were ALSO sucked in and seduced by Ghomeshi on a much larger, public scale, and it went on unabated for years and years.

But tell me this. Who ended up taking the fall?

Personally, I believe women are bewildered, embarrassed and frightened by being abused and will sometimes downplay it, even contacting the abuser to try to somehow make it right. Yes, it's a form of denial. But if it is, then the CBC was in PROFOUND denial in a situation with similar dynamics. 




There's even more to this as the oozing clump rises and drips in front of my eyes.  As is often the case, Ghomeshi may well have attracted vulnerable women who grew up with abuse as the norm. But this is considered an old saw now, and if you dare say it, someone will dig up a case where it "wasn't like that", demolishing your theory. Not that there is any emotional baggage/misogyny/discrediting of women there. But we don't necessarily know what we think we know. People are not always going to reveal their childhood wounds to the world. Does anyone - I mean anyone do that, unless they have no personal boundaries whatsoever?

My God, the tangled, visceral mess this is dredging up - do we really want to look? When it triggers belligerent name-calling rather than an attempt to understand an extremely complex, often-baffling situation, it just makes my gut sink. One very well-respected writer slathered the same abuse on Ghomeshi and DeCoutere, dismissing them both in a Facebook post as "morons". He seemed to feel it was perfectly all right so long as they were equally slagged and savaged. Quite a number of  the responses to his post were supportive, and I don't know how many "likes" it got because if I look at it one more time, I will likely gag.




There is always the question, when a woman is with an abusive partner, "Why doesn't she just leave?" First, there is no "just" about it. Women are most likely to be murdered by their partners when they leave. Abusive men get women on a yoyo string and keep yanking them around, sometimes for years. This does not mean these women are ninnies, have no will of their own, or are making stuff up just to damage someone's reputation for fun and profit.

Lucy Coutere got up there to try to stop this bastard. It probably won't work. She left herself open to considerable contempt because she exposed at least some of the complicated, contradictory dynamics of abuse to a culture that simply does not want to know. Will this change anything? Why do I feel like we're sinking here? My suspicion and my dread is that we are going not forwards but backwards in our disgraceful treatment of women, and I see nothing on the horizon that tells me it will ever be any different.



POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. This is almost a separate post, but I decided to run them together because, folks, I am tired today. I'm dealing with unknown health issues and a change of doctor, and maybe yet another round of tests, which is why you're getting so many gifs lately, and comments about news items. But this I had to write about. It's my response to a breathtakingly abusive Facebook post that I discovered in that diseased, slimy clump I just wrote about. I don't know why I'm not running this asshole's comments with his real name on them, except that his tone scared the hell out of me and I don't want him coming after me.

This was not just a rant but an eruption of some corrosive substance that was so frightening, I didn't want it making contact with my skin. His remarks were loosely based on the Ghomeshi trial - or  maybe it was just an excuse to air his toxic views on women in general. He went into great depth about various types of mental illness and how they affected females. But this wasn't about mental illness. At all. It was about hate. He believed such women were inherently evil and almost gleefully destructive, deliberately wreaking havoc on the legal system to get their kicks. He painted a picture of savage harpies flying through the air like Valkyries, living for the barbaric pleasure of destroying other human beings. (This somehow was all tied in with Lucy DeCoutere and the "irreparable damage" she is doing to an innocent man with her obviously concocted accusations.) It was, incredibly, from someone IN the system who has dealt with mentally disturbed women for years. Looking him up on his Facebook page while holding my nose, I discovered he is a psychotherapist whose specialty is dealing with the "criminally insane", a term that should have been drop-kicked into the nearest sewer decades ago.



So. Not only is the Ghomeshi trial dragging out a truly incredible amount of hidden misogyny, it's jacking the cover off a jaw-dropping ignorance of what it is to suffer a mental illness. These are my NOT-dispassionate thoughts in response: 

"Have you heard of 'mental illness', or do you think it's just a form of evil or a choice women make to be perverse? Humanity still has incredible fear and loathing of mental illness and writes it off as a willful, even gleeful form of violence and destruction that people COULD "help"/change if they just pulled themselves together (with, of course, no resources to do so). Maybe, at one point, when they were little children, someone loved these women, but it's even more likely that they were horribly damaged. So at some point, did they decide it would be a kick to "go bad"? I am NOT saying, well then, let them go ahead and kill people, be destructive, etc. Society does need to be protected from those who are so sick they can't control themselves, or are not aware of what they are doing, or perhaps (like my brother, who died tragically from the effects of schizophrenia) are hearing voices telling them to kill people. My brother wasn't evil, at all, but he was constantly being "told" to do evil things by those voices. He virtually never acted on it, and now I wonder how he ever had the strength of mind to do that, probably far beyond what most "normal" people have. The feeling is, well, these women should just control themselves, or (something you hear all the time now, which always puts the onus on the sufferer) "reach out for help". Hmmm, WHAT help, I wonder? The kind YOU are offering? Might they not have better prospects for survival in the vastly more compassionate throes of their disease?"





POST-POST.  I usually think of "something after the something". Last night I went to Caitlin's dance recital, and I can't begin to tell you what joy it gave me, not to mention how terrific 12-year-old Caitlin has become in four genres of dance: jazz, tap, hiphop and musical theatre. I say "become" because this kid has worked so incredibly hard, completely overcoming the self-consciousness that used to cause her to take sneak-peeks at the other kids. Now she's bold, sassy and full of pizzazz.

 But that's not what I have to say right now.

 There was a puzzling number by another group. I forget the name of it: something like "One Person's Craziness is Another Person's Real", and it consisted of six teenaged girls writhing around on the floor in straightjackets.

 At various times during the spooky, haunted-house-like music, they stood up and "made crazy" in the way we still think of as crazy, pulling faces, jumping and thrashing around. This wasn't just silly or stupid, it was disturbing, and it made me angry. It was playing with the trappings of "madness" (one of my least-favorite terms) in order to entertain an audience. A cheap trick, because craziness is still so vastly entertaining, particularly at the institutional level where a human being's worth seems to equal that of a block of wood. If we wish to write off or dismiss anyone in our culture, we accuse them of being a "whack job" (and no one stops to think how dehumanizing it is to be referred to as a "job"). 



I couldn't figure out if this thing was supposed to be funny, because at the end they all rushed off the stage into the audience and made everybody laugh. I didn't. I know that I have been, at various times, accused of having no sense of humour because I object to all this. It just isn't real to people, and that's the whole trouble: they don't get why it is a problem. (Is there someone in the room? . . . No? Didn't think so.)

 OK, I hated it, but isn't one of the purposes of art to disturb and unsettle?  Last year a group did a strangely haunting dance routine called Gates of Auschwitz. This was set in - Auschwitz - and featured guards and captive Jews. But it was done in a surprisingly spare, restrained way, not playing down the horror so much as implying it in stark, minimalist fashion. I liked it, partly because it was provocative and daring and performed with a great deal of sensitivity.

 The girls in the straightjackets were just. . . girls in straightjackets. Loonies, wackos, nutbars, and all those names we hear every day when we want to write someone off as less than human. And the funny thing is that no one bats an eyelash, because whack jobs are, apparently, always fair game.

 (Speller's note. I am aware that the proper spelling is "straitjacket", but I am a little tired of being "corrected" when I spell things properly. Accurate spelling has gone the way of the dodo. So I hereby surrender to the WRONG spelling, just to save myself grief.)
Another word for mentally ill




Afflicted with or exhibiting irrationality and mental unsoundness: brainsick, crazy, daft, demented, disordered, distraught, dotty, insane, lunatic, mad, maniac, maniacal, moonstruck, off, touched, unbalanced, unsound, wrong. (Informal) bonkers, cracked, daffy, gaga, loony. (Slang) bananas, batty, buggy, cuckoo, fruity, loco, nuts, nutty, screwy, wacky. (Chiefly British) crackers. (Law) non compos mentis. Idioms: around the bend, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter, not all there, nutty as a fruitcake, off (or out of) one's head, off one's rocker, of unsound mind, out of one's mind, sick in the head, stark raving mad. See sane


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Ryan IS the Taekwondo Kid!




A broken board - a blue belt! Take a bow, Ryan.


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Friday, February 5, 2016

Harold, you can come in my window any time.


  
 



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Love walked in



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Thursday, February 4, 2016

Bentley's World



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Wednesday, February 3, 2016



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Tuesday, February 2, 2016

An offer you can't refuse




Well, yes.

And no.

I know I show my age when I say I started book reviewing back in 1983. Probably did 350 of them over the next 30 years or so (gulp), ending it only when my last steady source of reviews, the Edmonton Journal, told me they had cut their formerly-lavish books section to half a page and wouldn't be needing my services any more.

It was a lot of hard work. I sweated and laboured over those things. I tried my best, every time, to read every word, to analyze the writer's skills with care (this is starting to sound like a Boy Scout pledge, so forgive me), and to figure out just what made this book "work" or "not work" in my estimation. To do so, I had to develop a set of analytical skills as well as an appreciation for the aesthetics of effective writing. Ahem.

In other words, dang! I think I was pretty good at it.




But, big surprise, I did not always give each of these 300-odd books "good" reviews, though I tried to assess them fairly. As a rule, they fell roughly into three categories: a sort of top 10 - 15 per cent that I believed were truly outstanding, a large middle that covered a very wide spectrum (and I was willing to forgive many weaknesses if the book had some redeeming strengths), and a dregs, a sludgy bottom which included a vapid thing by Anna Murdoch, then-wife of Rupert, obviously given the license to slap any old sewage she wanted onto the page and still have it published. (Another all-time worst was by Daniel Richler, son of the legendary Mordecai. Something about nepotism.)

Nowadays, when you write a book review, you do it "for" a writer. Usually, one you know.

Usually, too, it is one who has already written a book review "for" you.




This reminds me of the old Mafia saying, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". But whatever way you look at it, it's - lousy.

Lousy because these aren't "reviews" at all. They're about as meaningful and manipulative as Facebook "likes". In fact, they are ALL "likes", a five-star bartering system. If you hand out one of these, the recipient is then, suddenly, beholden to you and "owes" you five stars.

What the flying fuck does this have to do with the quality of the book???

I must be old school, or "no school", or something, because I won't take part in this ridiculous charade, even though I've been "reviewed" in the most sappy, generic way, a way that indicates the person slipping me the stars hasn't even gone near my novel, let alone read it. But why should that make a difference? These are stars we're talking about. Why else does a writer get up in the morning?




A real review, usually called a "bad" one, may help sink the author's career without a trace, particularly if what he/she is turning out is literary pond scum. I've been happy to contribute to such sinkings, but only when warranted. Meanwhile, I NEVER play the five-star shuffle. I was approached once by a Facebook "friend" (who was unfriended pretty quickly after that) who messaged me thusly: "Hello, Margaret! Happy to be on-board! I notice you got hardly any reviews for your novel on Amazon. Well, sometimes I have that problem too! If you'd be willing to take a look at my last eleven books and post your five-star reviews of them, I'd be more than happy to fill up some of those awkward spaces for you!"  I thought about it a lot, for maybe seventeen seconds, wondering how long it might take me to write a review without reading a single word of ANY of her eleven novels.




The whole thing quickly went south, but not before she mentioned the name of a "Hollywood producer" - he had an Irish name I can't remember - whom she talked to about "developing" one of her eleventy-seven interchangeable novels. She said he might be interested in The Glass Character as a "property" - a term I hate only slightly less than "brand" - and gave me his email address. And I was all set to follow up on it, when my hand involuntarily jerked back from the mouse with a fierce crackle, like the Wicked Witch trying to grab the ruby slippers.

I googled the guy, and found out that he was a convicted felon currently serving time for embezzlement, forgery and fraud. Passed himself off as a Hollywood producer. There was some sort of message board-type thing in which people expressed their ire at all the various ways in which this man had ripped them off and taken them for a ride.




Imagine. Fraud! How can anyone think of being that dishonest? Whatever happened to the great literary virtues, like sincerity? Don't people even bother to fake it any more?

The most I ever made from writing all those ACTUAL book reviews was about $300 a throw (and yes, I WAS paid - don't fall over backwards from the news). Nowadays, I'd get exactly nothing, but maybe-just-maybe I'd get a fawning, drooly thing back from the author that I could paste up or post on my Amazon page.

But why stop there? I'm thinking of going into business in a slightly more ambitious way: a service to create individualized, post-it-ready reviews, one-click, no-mess-or-fuss. A computer will scan the novel and sum up the plot, pull out relevant quotes, etc. etc., and effuse about it appropriately. It will even sound like you've read it, but you won't have to do a thing (except pay me)! I'll set up subscriptions and everything. Maybe I'll call it Fakebook! But if it's like all my other good ideas, somebody thought of it last week or last year and is already rolling in the profits.


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Monday, February 1, 2016

Now they call them "vines"











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Saturday, January 30, 2016

Return to Blue Bayou





One of the great voices in pop music - in ANY kind of music - was silenced a couple of years ago by Parkinson's Disease.

 But there's more to this posting than that sad discovery. Something used to happen - on and off - for years and years. I'd be standing in a store and a song would come on the p. a. system, or whatever you call it, that music in the background which is usually either sappy or irritating.

 The passion of it, the yearning, would root me to the spot. This wasn't in an era where you could easily identify a piece of music, or identify it at all. I would only get a snatch of it, with all the noise and jostling of a busy store. Then years would go by, and I'd try to forget it.

 Then it would happen again.

 I assumed I'd never find out who sang this, and then, through the unlikely and almost magical arabesques of YouTube, I somehow found my way back to it last night.

 I saw the title, saw her picture, and for some reason, a light came on.

 That's the song. I knew it before I even played it.

 It's a Roy Orbison song, which explains the yearning, and the almost tango-like rhythm of it with its Latin flavour.

 It fits Ronstad's incredible voice  like a hand in glove.



I remember her first hit with the Stone Poneys, A Different Drum, famously written by Mike Nesmith, either pre- or during- or post-Monkees. That voice! The clarity, the cut-crystal vibration, the passion. After that initial hit, she quickly developed a career in her own right.

 You see her now in interview, and she isn't able to sing any more. Tragically, her voice deserted her when she was on stage, unable to produce anything but "barking". She's still Linda Ronstadt, and she doesn't look like she has done anything to her face, leaving her with the most naturally-beautiful skin I've ever seen on a woman of nearly seventy. No, her neck isn't taut and firm, and she has gained some weight, but why is that considered such a tragedy? She always had a roundish face even when she was young.

 I also saw an interview with Darryl Hannah, who unfortunately looks grotesque now. The entire upper half of her face is dead from Botox: smooth, flat and immobile. Her eyebrows never move. Watch a normal person in conversation, and eyebrow movement, however subtle, is very much a part of the face's animation, particularly the expressiveness of the eyes.


With eyebrows and forehead completely frozen, it creates a creepy Day of the Dead feeling as the lower half of the face still tries to move. But it too will have been hauled up and tampered with. As a person ages, the muscles begin to sag and pull at the tightened skin in odd ways. Skin is supposed to age along with the underlying structure, and if it can't, you get a disturbingly squirmy look. This is even worse than that House of Wax immobility which is considered so desirable. When it gets really bad, as the person reaches their 60s and 70s, the mouth sinks into the face and becomes a horizontal slit, almost Muppetlike, with the smile going sideways. Eyes sink into the exaggerated cheek implants as if they're peeping out of deep caves. And let's not get into the fat, blubbery lips that are supposed to look so sexy: the instant you see them, you think, collagen. It's hard to believe that anyone could find this macabre look appealing, but stars pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have it done to them. No doubt plastic surgeons convince them they look great, and a glance in the mirror might seem to prove it. No one checks how they look when they're talking.



But Linda, fortunately, does not seem to have done that to herself. Fate has done enough to her, I suppose, in taking away her voice.

 I have had a modest recovery just lately - I won't say what those things are, because to you they might sound laughably small. But added together, they make me feel that perhaps I have not been as devastatingly robbed as I thought. Maybe not the entire the rug has been pulled out from under me.

 So I got this song back, this haunting song so full of thwarted desire. It took years and years, and it happened by a combination of accident, and strange magnetism.

 But it's back, and now I know who it is.


Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
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Friday, January 29, 2016

All the new Barbies.




I have nothing to say about this.


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You only have four real friends. Get used to it


You Only Have Four Real Friends on Facebook, Study Says

Everyone else on the social media site is just someone you're connected to





Facebook friends are almost never real friends, a new study suggests.
By Rachel DickerJan. 29, 2016, at 12:38 p.m.+ More

Facebook makes users feel both connected and isolated.

There are plenty of well-wishers when your birthday comes around, but how many of those people would you call to hang out with you?

According to a study from Oxford University, "There is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communication advantages of online media are unable to overcome."

In other words: Your brain can't handle too many friends. In fact, the average person has about four real ones, regardless of the number listed on their profile.




To reach this conclusion, R.I.M. Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford and author of the study, examined a sample of 3,375 people in the United Kingdom ages 18 to 65. Some used social media regularly, while others did not.

The participants who used social media were asked how many Facebook friends they could depend on during an emotional or social crisis, and the average response – which barely varied between age groups – was four. The average study participant, however, had 150 Facebook friends.

That's a 2.7 percent rate of true friendship.




Further, "The data show that the size and range of online egocentric social networks, indexed as the number of Facebook friends, is similar to that of offline face-to-face networks," Dunbar writes in the study.

Translation: People who use Facebook have, on average, the same number of friends as those who don't.

So maybe we ought to make more calls and pay more visits to the people we love – there aren't that many, after all.

Rachel Dicker is an Associate Editor, Social Media at U.S. News & World Report. You can follow her on Twitter or reach her at rdicker@usnews.com.




BLOGGER'S BLAH. Yes, I have long suspected this. In the past little while, two different Facebook "friends" were fussing and fuming at all these pesky friend requests they kept getting. Didn't they know they were nearing the 5000-friend limit and needed to keep those precious few spaces open so THEY could hand-pick the remaining people ("supporters")?

Several times I've seen the advice to go through those five thousand friends carefully and weed out dead people or those with inactive accounts (i. e., few or no friends, which amounts to the same thing). A "friend" is of no use unless they, in turn, have a lot of friends. I even saw a rant - a real one, not a parody, though it was almost unbelievable - saying that all these dead people were making it difficult for her to keep an accurate count on her total. The nerve of those people! On their deathbed, rattling out their last, they should be legally required to gasp to their nearest and dearest: "Please. . . close. . . Face. . . book. . . acc. . .acc. . . cckkkkkkk. . ." (dies).




So do I have four "real" friends on Facebook? There are people I used to be close friends with - even very close friends, but drift does happen, even if you still care about them. But who would be there in a crisis? The one person who immediately comes to mind is in a health crisis of his own, a major one, to the point that I often wonder if he has died and I just haven't found out about it yet. But he'd be there for me emotionally, I know this beyond question, just as I try to be there for him, simply because we love each other. He has proven his loyalty for the past 25 years, but the rest? I'm not so sure. I think if I were in a really bad way, most of them would just disappear into the woodwork. It has happened before.

So I have a ways to go until I hit that magical 5000 mark. Until then, just keep those friend requests coming.


  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA




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