A better choice for President?

There aren't many Pogophiles left in the world. I think most of Walt Kelly's cartoons went out of print a long time ago, though he makes brief appearances on the internet. But just sort of scattered around.

I was raised on Pogo. I may even have a raggy old Pogo comic book left somewhere, its cover torn off, with pencil-printing and scribbling all over it from four little kids learning to write at different times. For some reason, certain books became scribblers for us. (Scribblers being, for my American readers, things you scribble into). We also had a Pogo hard-cover book, a real luxury, which included many of the early scribble-books in one luxurious volume. It never had a cover on it in my memory. And then there was a weird and wonderful record album called Songs of the Pogo, which you can listen to right now if you want to:

As with the rest of Pogo, the songs were written in a smart-assed double-talk that no one could decipher. It wasn't meant to be deciphered, as it was just too  twisty-turny and pun-laden to be understandable (and yet, there was meaning in it too). 

Just off the top of my head:

I was stirring up a stirrup cup

In a stolen sterling stein

When I chanced upon a ladle

Who was once my valentine:

"O wence that wince, my wench?" quoth I,

She blushed and said, "Oh, sir -

Old Daddy isn't stirring since my Mama's been in stir."

I made an attempt to transcribe a few more of these, and I just couldn't do it. Maybe they aren't meant to be written down, but only heard.

As a kid, I was by far the youngest, a full thirteen years younger than my eldest sister. That means I was, in essence, surrounded by adults. They all seemed to know what Pogo meant, what the words were all about. I had no idea. In fact, the older I got, the less sense they made.

No one ever explained any of this to me. It was like Ernie Kovacs (one of my very first memories), completely incomprehensible to me, though I was sure the adults knew what it was all about - and that I SHOULD know, but was just too slow and dense to pick it up. So I dared not ask.

When they went and put me in something called a Major Work Class in Grade 5 (in essence, for kids with abnormally high IQs), I was completely shocked. Up until that point, I had known all my siblings were smart, but assumed that I wasn't.

Pogo is stashed pretty far back in my mind, though I did find a nice Pogo for President sign during the horrors of the election. Then today I found a bonanza: a story called NO, which I'd never seen before, though I do remember hearing an odd recording of it which was an add-on to a CD re-release of Songs of the Pogo.

I first discovered some individual panels from NO on Google, but I never thought I'd find it all. Today it appeared on somebody's blog, all 28 pages of it, and the pages were all the same size! So I was quickly able to make one of my little gif slideshows out of it, which you see at the top. As far as copyright and all that, what the hell can you do? EVERYTHING is on Pinterest and other "shared "sites now, and it is impossible to find the provenance of anything. It can't be done. Everything on Facebook is shared. I am easily able to "embed" Facebook videos on my blog, because there is an "embed" setting that allows you to. . . embed. If they didn't WANT you to embed, why would it even be there?

Everything belongs to everyone. Is this Communism in action?

So anyway, I made a giffy thing with the whole story (at the top, did I say that?), though of course the problem is the speed of it. Like all of Kelly's stuff, it's very talky, and this increases as the story wears on. This is about as slow as these gifs go, so the large amount of text at the end might be tricky. But the thing goes around and repeats endlessly, and there are page numbers at the bottom which are a help. (Page numbers are heaven to me, as are indexes. Sometimes I wish fiction had indexes.)

Should I now make PicMix bling-pictures of these? Not sure how I'd do it, but who knows. If I can bling Hilda, maybe I can bling Pogo. 

ARCHAELOGICAL DIG DEPARTMENT: dig this! These are just a few images from the brown, crumbling Pogo book I still have on my bookshelf. It was published in 1951, three years before I was born. The first one is a scan of a "thing" that looks like a chunk of papyrus or mummy-wrapping. Was it ever rectangular? It's hard to believe. There is some serious mathematics going on here, whatever it means, and someone has written something that looks like Pagor in primitive cursive. 

For those who are not familiar with Kelly-esque 

linguistic arabesques, here's a sample page of it.

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that "someone" coloured in some of these pages. The same thing happened to my lovely Wesley Dennis pen-and-ink drawings in my copy of Misty of Chincoteague. (Come to think of it, it wasn't even my copy. My brother Walt owned it and passed it down to Arthur, who passed it down to me. Nothing was mine when I was a kid: in every picture I can find, I am wearing boys' clothing that has been handed down twice.) The colouring is bad enough that this might be my handiwork. Howland Owl looks pretty scribbly. But then. . . isn't scribbling what it's all about? 

Incredibly, the first title I considered for this blog was Scribble Scribble. Then it was Margaret Gunning's House of Dreams: intentionally sappy and Barbie-ish, but I changed it when some bitch pronounced my blog "embarrassing". But that was after my piece about how nasty Lloyd Dykk was, which didn't go down well with people after he died.

I honestly think, to this day, that he would have found it entertaining.

Crying in the wilderness

I made this giffy slide-show thingie to illustrate a piece of music which I can't include here, 'cuz it ain't on the internet anywhere. It's from an old Paul Winter album called Canyon, and it consists of a cello playing doomy, moody arpeggios while a man sings like he is hanging off the edge of the world.

It's a wilderness wail, a come-to-the-end-of-everything howl of sorrow and grief that is quite extraordinary, because it has no words. Not many could do that. In fact, I don't think I've heard ANYONE do it besides this guy, whoever he is.

This gif didn't turn out great. It purposely runs quite slowly to try to match the music. I cropped the 46 frames totally wrong, should've gone for widescreen and instead chose something closer to a square. I found some great images, but the gif program spat them back out at me with white margins, which they never had going in.

The photos are a collection of private and public ones, all on the theme of - what - angst? Aloneness? Mortality, and the great unfathomable? Maybe all of those things. 

I look at other people, and it's not that I think they're necessarily richer or smarter, but don't they just have it "better" than me in some indefinable way? Such as being a famous writer. There's one. No one knocked her guts out as much as I did, for so little reward. It just wasn't in the cards for me.

Other things worked out, but how mortal are we? We all hang by a spiderweb. We had a death in the family on Friday, not really close family but very much a part of the circle for years. He had been off the scene for several years when his wife became estranged from my daughter-in-law. But family is family, is it not? - the only glue I've had in my life. Oh, yes, I know these are universal things, we all die, but isn't it terrifying just the same? We don't know when or how, or who. I would like to go first, but I see how selfish that is, and how unlikely.

So if you watch these images, sort of badly-cropped because I wasn't thinking, try to imagine a man crying in the wilderness, his voice rising and falling, lamenting in grief, while a cello moans and keens in the background.

It's how I'm feeling right now.

POST-BLOG. OK, it's the next day and I see these images totally differently. I think it's one of the best gif slideshows I've made. Who knows how I will feel about it tomorrow. 

Attack of the fluffy little puppies!

Don't worry - be happy

Hilda: all wet

Hilda is "all wet" in these three panels, which I could not resist animating. If I could, I'd make her get up and jump out of the frame and run around. I'd even make her talk. 

If she were real, she'd be someone I'd like to know.

Much is made of her "plus-size" proportions, but I don't think of her that way. She simply is. Her body is her body, and she derives great enjoyment from it. She's often depicted playing with animals, or lazing around in nature, feeling entirely at home wherever she is. 

She is the antithesis of neurotic, anxious, angry, gloomy, self-conscious, over-intellectual. . . in fact, she probably wouldn't know what "antithesis" means. Nor would she care - she would have gone out for ice cream.

She is, of course, a cartoon character, so we can't assign too many traits to her. But enjoy life? You bet she does. I like that about her. Though she's not shown with friends or lovers, she's often reading letters (with immense pleasure) or talking on the phone. And with Hilda, you just sort of "know". She would not spend her Saturday nights alone.

Bentley's World

It's nice to be a cat.

Death is a party, life is a bitch

I've always had a thing for Anthony Perkins, and I come back around to it every few years. This is the song I usually come back to. There was something curiously affecting about his voice. He wasn't a natural singer and did not have a big or resonant set of pipes. But he had something else. Along with his innate musicality, he had sincerity. His singing was like speaking in some ways - not speak-singing like those actors who can't sing, but communicating so much intensity with the song that it is like a conversation. 

Yes, he got typecast as Norman Bates, and the only sad thing about that was the dreadful set of sequels. Other than that, he got along well and performed, sometimes brilliantly, in just about every acting genre. People noticed he looked rather strange in the latter part of his life, that his face was somehow less mobile on one side. What people didn't know was that he had Bell's palsy, and in getting treatment for it he found out he had AIDS.

People don't die from AIDS any more, so we've lost touch with the horror of it. They can live a long time, though the disease must be a constant presence on some level. It does not "go away". Being bipolar does not "go away" either, it is a constant presence, and it is not pleasant to have to take six drugs to control it. Just thought I'd throw that in.

I've read a couple of Perkins bios. One was kind of raggy, sensational, as if that was the only part of his life that mattered. It recounted every escapade and foible, but second-hand, through the accounts of people who had known him. The other one was a little too reserved, respectful, but devoid of detail. I think he was both of those people, and neither - an enigma. When he died, closely attended by his wife Berry and their two sons, his friends decided to have a be-in in the sickroom, bringing sleeping bags and food and singing to him while he passed in and out of consciousness. At one point he sat up suddenly and said, "What is this, a death watch?" - provoking much hilarity.

To die like that - I've only ever heard of one other person who died like that, with a party going on around him. Alan Ginsberg. It says something about a person, if people show up for your death, sit at your bedside, listen to stories they've heard a dozen times, hug the wife and take the kids out for hamburgers so she can have a break. 

People constantly talk about giving, but it's also blessed to receive, to stop fighting the gift. I know something about this, and I am going to know a lot more about it. If people can't "take" (and they often won't or can't, thinking it's somehow selfish or "bad"), they block the goodwill. It can no longer flow. They keep their loved ones from helping them, refuse them. In essence, they hang up the phone on love.

I don't know what got me started on all this. "Summertime Love". The title makes you think of Beach Blanket Bingo or something like that. But it's not like that at all. The song is from a strange, mystical stage musical called Greenwillow. It only ran for a couple of months.

"That actor who turned out to be gay". I don't much care about that any more, and he doesn't, where he is now. Such things really don't matter. The LGBTQ movement exists to prove it doesn't matter - doesn't nail you to a cross or suck the joy out of your life, because it can't.

How you die reflects how you have lived. Absolutely. I pray someone will be there, I do. Just one will be OK with me.

(A postscript. This needs to be said because it is part of the story. Less than ten years after AIDS claimed Tony, Berry Berenson was killed. She was on one of those planes that hit the World Trade Centre. I don't want to think about what those final minutes were like. But she, too, was not alone. I hope there was some shred of comfort in that.)

Women's March on Washington

Don't tell

We can build a dream with love

Come on, people, come on, children

Come on down to the glory river.

Gonna wash you up, and wash you down, 

Gonna lay the devil down, 

gonna lay that devil down.

Come on, people! Come on, children!

There's a king at the glory river

And the precious king, 

he loved the people to sing,

Babes in the blinkin' sun sang

"We Shall Overcome".

I got fury in my soul, 

fury's gonna take me to the glory goal

In my mind I can't study war no more.

Save the people, 

save the children, 

save the country

save the country

Come on, people, come on, children 

Come on down to the glory river 

Gonna wash you up and wash you down 

Gonna lay the devil down, 

gonna lay that devil down

Come on, people! Sons and mothers 

Keep the dream of the two young brothers 

Take that dream and ride that dove

We can build a dream with love, I know, 

We can build a dream with love

We can build a dream with love, I know

We can build a dream with love, 

We can build a dream with love, I know,

We can build a dream with love.

I got fury in my soul, 

fury's gonna take me to the glory goal 

In my mind I can't study war no more.

Save the people

Save the children

Save the country

Save the country

Save the country

NOW!

Let's wait for spring

On a day in which the world seems to have gone to crap, let us focus on more lifeward things.

Pack of Howling Coyotes

I didn't take this video, but I use it here as a sort of example. We hear coyotes all the time around these parts, but late at night when it's hard to capture them. The trilling and "laughing" (hyena-ish) sounds are very weird. The first time I heard them, my hair stood on end. It was a real "WTF??" moment. Combined with the very loud, resonant owl hooting (barred owls) we hear at night, it makes for a weird soundscape.

This is like suburbia with fifty-foot cedar trees in it, and bush only a stone's throw away. There are cougar and bobcat sightings, but mainly because we have raped their territory without a single thought about what they will do and where they will live. Should they just vaporize, or what? Why should they want something so silly as a "home", a place to live, to exist? WE have homes, of course, but that is an entirely different matter because we are entitled to them. These coyotes look prosperous, but ours are scruffy, usually thin, shy during the day, and only bold in packs. I would not fear an attack from them, but pets are another matter. Small mammals are fair game for them.

So add the trills and barks to the hoots, cackles and general jungle hysteria of the owls as they swoop and dive, and you have a sort of urban cacophany. I will admit, the first time I really noticed the owls, I didn't know what they were. I thought they were kids whooping at each other. So I missed seeing one that was likely right in my back yard. Something primitive about that face, like a ceremonial mask.

Bentley! GET DOWN!

      The new star of my blog shows off his aerial feats.

"Where'd you get the gun, John?"

Rain fell on Skagit Valley. 

It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of the mallards. 

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. 

This quote is the kind-of-a-thing that makes writers wanna give up forever. It's the feverish vision of a strange sort of man, half Byron, half Donald Duck (and half Betty Boop, probably, though we don't know where that half is stashed).

I was trying to find the whole quote, because I know it goes on and on. So I found my punky-smelling, beige-paged copy of Tom Robbins' classic Another Roadside Attraction, and began to dig. After getting lost in the story a few times, I gave up, but I did find this:

The afternoon sky looked like a brain. Moist Gray. Convoluted. A mad-scientist breeze probed at the brain, causing it to bob and quiver as if it were immersed in a tank of strange liquids. The Skagit Valley was the residue at the bottom of the tank. Toward dusk, the wind flagged, the big brain stiffened (mad doctor's experiment a failure), and ragged ribbons of Chinese mist unfurled in the valley. The blaring cries of. . . 

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE. Mercy. Mercy.

And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

This reminds me of nothing more than Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's a-gonna Fall: I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking/But I'll know my song well before I start singing. 

Why? Why all this? If you follow this strange, incoherent blog-about-nothing, you'll know about the cedar boughs outside my office window. They are vanes, omens, semaphores. They hang in three-dimensional layers, a sweet intimate bough that sweeps on my left side, a less-visible perpendicular wodge of green that doesn't want to talk to me, and behind all that, a backdrop of bush that just goes on and on.

We live in suburbia, but at night comes the trilling and squealing of shabby-looking pack animals, the kind that search around for garbage in the night. At first I thought I was going crazy with the sound. My husband, half-deef, couldn't even hear it. It was only much later that I found out what they were.

Anyway, this isn't about that.

Rain sweeps and drones in Vancouver, a close enough cousin to Skagit Valley to pass one of those primordial DNA tests (if only by a whisker). Yes. We have this too:

Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

Stop!

Pitiless, endless, suicidal, the rain takes up residence for some eight months of the year. No, twelve. Let's quit lying about this so we can go on living. As in northern Alberta, where I lived for many years, it can rain just like it can snow, any old time. In the middle of a grand day. It can split the merry blue sky like a railroad spike.

I like a storm. I love a storm when I am not in it. We don't get good hail around here (hail merry!), but in Alberta, once in a while a big satchelful of temporary diamonds would be dumped on the ground, and the air would hiss with ozone. The roof would thunder and dents would appear on the hoods of cars. Then a gleaming bounty lay on the ground, sublimating in sinuous vapors. Soon it'd just be that rice-paddy mush that's left over from a violent hunderstorm.

Here it's more temperate. Just a continuous pissing down on your dreams, a Monty Python foot crushing all ambition and hope.

I just realized something. Shakespeare bombed. He said something like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", then goes on blathering about "the darling buds of May". Doesn't the idjit know when summer starts? There's a meteorologist on CTV news who knows better than that. And he's not the most celebrated writer who ever lived.

What's my point? Jesus! it's wet, and grey, and discouraging out there. I won't tell you what I've been going through with my work lately. It's the best of times, and the worst of times. Something spectacular might happen, but at the same time, it might be the end of everything.

Or, as usual, I will just be left hanging and face the same indifference, the averted face and cold shoulder, that my mother presented to me when I was born.

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

The universe doesn't care. It's indifferent. But why do people have to be? 

And what about my mother? My mother.

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads. 

They might as well be dead. 

If the rain comes, if the rain comes. 

When the sun shines they slip into the shade 

(When the sun shines down.) 

And sip their lemonade. 

(When the sun shines down.) 

When the sun shines, when the sun shines. 

Rain, I don't mind. 

Shine, the weather's fine.

I can show you that when it starts to rain, 

(When the Rain comes down.) 

Everything's the same. 

(When the Rain comes down.) 

I can show you, I can show you. 

Rain, I don't mind. 

Shine, the weather's fine.

Can you hear me, that when it rains and shines, 

(When it Rains and shines.) 

It's just a state of mind? 

(When it Rains and shines)

Can you hear me, can you hear me? 

sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI. 

(Rain) 

niaR. 

(Rain) 

enihsnuS.

This makes me want to go on living!

Bentley the space alien

No - no - it can't be so