Look, everybody: it's Harold Lloyd!

It's not every day that you open a dusty old book and discover a treasure trove of sheer magic.

But the laws of the probable can take an unlikely turn, if the subject matter happens to be Harold Lloyd.

Though I finished writing my Lloyd-inspired novel The Glass Character about a year ago, my research (if you can call such an enjoyable pursuit research) continues. I just keep winkling out more books, most of them very old and long out of print. On a Harold Lloyd message board, I saw a discussion of a book called Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy by William Cahn. I had never heard of the title or the author, but I started digging on the internet, and before I knew it I was ordering a copy.

It's sad but understandable why most books about Harold Lloyd are yellowed and musty and rather out of date. For a very long time he was viewed through a pretty inferior pair of glasses (so to speak). He was always seen as a distant third to Chaplin and Keaton, which confounds me every time I watch one of his charming and wonderfully-crafted pictures. 

There's only one reason I love Harold Lloyd so much (well, two, but I'll get to the other one): he makes me laugh. He makes me laugh myself teary-eyed, and gasp as I laugh, at his subtlety and insight and tremendous gift for creating audience identification.

But for decades, it seemed that nobody knew where to place him in film history except as an "also-ran". Richard Schickel wrote an unflattering book about him several years after his death, so I guess that was considered the last word on the subject.

Someone had the gall to say he "lacked tenderness",a barb which was completely inaccurate (for obviously that critic had never seen Girl Shy or The Kid Brother). He was labelled a "go-getter", for reasons that still confound me. Go-get what? All his struggles were motivated by love, usually unrequited love, which is why critics now believe that Harold Lloyd invented the genre of romantic comedy.

I don't know why it has taken all these decades to blow the dust off this magnificent comedic legend and restore him to his rightful place. That brings me to the other reason I love him so much: he is sweet and fierce and almost supernaturally beautiful, as witness the photos in this post. And he stayed that way all his life.

Today I received a fat brown parcel in the mail, an old cloth-bound book with no cover on it and that mellow, old-papery smell that I love. It was the Cahn book, dated 1964. I began to flip through it, disappointed that the photos were so small, and most of them not even of Lloyd.

When I isolated and tinkered with a tiny, smudgy photo of his famous glasses, however, they leaped off the page and almost scared me. These are the glasses that transformed Lloyd from a so-so Chaplin imitator into a comic genius, not just for the silent era but for all time.

What a shock! They're hardly there. Though they look dark on-screen, they appear delicate, with no glass in them,  and when I lightened the exposure, I saw that they weren't black at all but tortoise-shell. It's eerie to look at these: you're seeing the essence of a unique talent, someone who knew that an everyman figure would engage audiences as never before. It's as if his antics, struggles and disappointments say to his viewers, "Has this ever happened to you?" Ah, yes - it has - and that's precisely why we laugh so hard.

I had a bonus surprise when I opened the book: a yellowed, very neatly-creased newspaper clipping fell out of the middle. It's a review that appeared in the Washington Star on Sunday, January 8, 1978, not of the Cahn book but of another Lloyd biography by Adam Reilly (which I also have). Is this a sign? Of what, I wonder? There was something a little spooky about this, and the strange little masthead stub that the reader must have used for a book mark.

Who originally owned this book, and carefully preserved that neatly-clipped, yellowed review? Obviously it was a Harold fan, perhaps long dead. I look at the clipping now and realize it's unlikely anyone has seen it for 34 years. But when I take a closer look, I see something even more bizarre. That little Evening Star "bookmark" is dated August 24, 1964, making it nearly half a century old. 

Why this enigmatic time capsule; what could it mean? Why do such strange things always seem to happen around Harold Lloyd?

Harold, you pop up in the darndest places.

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

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

What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?

Tell me, quick – without thinking for even a second – what is the opposite of love?

You may wonder: does love have an opposite? Isn’t Love the force that guides and governs the Universe?

I wish. But let’s get back to your answer.

85% of you will have quickly responded, before you could think about it, "Hate.”

I know, because I can hear you.

If in fact that's your answer, I consider it part of “conventional wisdom”, something I analyze and criticize as a regular theme on this blog. “Everything happens for a reason.” “God never gives us more than we can handle.” “If I did it before (usually something good), I can do it again." And, most of all, "You should forgive him. You'll feel so much better if you do."

What is hate, anyway? A violent form of – well, dislike. Of being offended by, or made angry or furious by. Of not wanting someone or something around. Of aversion. Of – and now you know why Tom Robbins once famously said, “There are no synonyms.”

We all know what hate is. We hear it’s not good for us, that it eats us up. It has a smoldering, even violent quality to it, a nastiness. Hate. Hate Hate.

So surely this must be the opposite of Love, the softness, sweetness, the warm enveloping of another soul (or thing), the wanting someone around, all the time. Oh, I don’t need to tell you.

It’s supposed to be the stuff that makes the world go ‘round, and it certainly seems to be the subject of at least 85% of popular music (and not a few classical pieces: Symphony Fantastique by Berlioz being a standout).

Personally, I know that I couldn’t get along very well without it. I don’t make it happen, do not will it to happen, or even make it go away. It seems to have a life of its own.

But consider this.

Love is a wanting, a caring, a need to be near. Affection.  But the root word affect is a pretty loaded term.

Most of the dictionary definitions are kind of baffling, but here’s one that might make a bit of sense:

A person's affect (please note, in this case affect is a noun, not a verb; it is also not a misspelling of effect) is the expression of emotion or feelings displayed to others through facial expressions, hand gestures, voice tone, and other emotional signs such as laughter or tears.

Not necessarily love. Just emotion.

This is a clue to what I consider the opposite of love. If affect(ion) is emotion, laughter or tears or other such displays of human vulnerability, then what’s the opposite of affect?

A lack of affect, even an absence of affect, a disaffection?

We’re getting close. The way I see it, the opposite of love couldn’t be hate, because hate is so “hot”. Hate means you are emotionally engaged. Hate means that, in a bizarre sort of way, you care. You may even care enough to want to rip the other person’s face off or scream abuse at them.

It means the other person, or perhaps the other ideology or even object, has a mighty and powerful hold over you, much as they might have if you were feeling . . .

Love.

OK, so what am I getting at in my usual convoluted way (for it’s Monday, after all)? The opposite of love could be only one thing.

Indifference.

Not giving a shit.

Not even noticing. Staring right through and not seeing. Ignoring. Brushing past without recognizing or saying hello.

Not acknowledging or even caring to acknowledge.

In its more malignant form, indifference (not caring) can lead to devastating emotional abandonment (the kind that leads a mother to leave her child’s name off her obituary, things like that). Humans are like puppies, much more than we want to admit. We just crave nurture, not just when we’re babies but through our entire lives.

If we don’t get nurture, we grab for whatever we can find: booze, drugs, overwork, overshopping, compulsive gambling, and (apparently a favorite, by all the evidence) eating too much, which used to be called gluttony and was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. (And by the way, whatever happened to sin? But that’s another post.)

Indifference. It’s the empty space where a heart should be, the ultimate self-protection, the not-caring that we think will keep us safe. It’s the “I don’t care much one way or another” that you hear so often in a world which is both overly touchy-feely and completely iced-over.

In a culture where you can unfriend someone at a click, indifference is becoming more popular than ever. If there is love, and I would hope that love will survive anything that could happen to the human race, indifference is “not-love”.

It's the cool shrug (which I saw every day of my childhood), the turned head, the letting go of my hand as if she forgot it was there.

And in my case, Ultimately, it’s “you don’t exist” or “you were never born”. Do you think people can’t do things like that to each other? Guess again.

I posted on this subject already as “fiction”, but I guess I need to come clean. My mother died in 2010. To say we were estranged is an understatement. I recently stumbled upon her obituary on-line, and couldn’t help but notice that two family members were not mentioned in my mother’s official, published life history.

My brother Arthur, and me.

It still shocks me to realize that my beloved brother and I were shut out, erased, stricken from the record like Moses in exile. I’m not even sure why it happened to my brother, who never deliberately did anything to hurt the family. Maybe it was just a way to hurt me even more, because he was the only one who offered me any genuine, unconditional affection. If the rest of the family voted not to do that, then obviously he was breaking the unspoken, unwritten rule.

Was it his mental illness? Did they think he could casually turn that off with a switch? Just how ashamed of him were they?

I think I know. 

I’m sorry, I just can’t keep myself out of this post, though I tried. I’m not some sociologist. When I married at age 19, I landed safely in a family whom I know loves me, even in the face of the usual day-to-day irritations and annoyances. I walked out of one system (because I had to), and into another, of my own free will.

My husband didn’t fall from the sky; I picked him out of all the men I could have given my life to.  He isn’t an alcoholic or violent or abusive or mean. His family doesn’t even drink. When his Mum died recently, it would not have even occurred to them to leave my name off the list of close kin.

According to my mother, or her wishes at least, she had two children, my eldest two siblings. And that’s all. I always thought she had four. Funny how that works. A friend of mine, appalled at what they did, said “If someone from your home town read that obituary, wouldn’t they wonder where you and your brother went?”

Oh, but my brother and I were never born, never even existed! Thus my husband, kids, and grandkids don’t exist either. Stricken from the record, permanently. Perhaps it's because we dared to think that we were treated less than lovingly as children. Surely that's grounds for permanent dismissal.


And people get all upset and legal if they're cut out of the will!


There is nothing my children could do, nor my grandchildren either, even viciously slandering my name, even murder, that could cause me to cut them dead like that (or, worse, declare them never-born). The omission renders the whole thing a lie. If someone can casually obliterate two pregnancies, two births, two lives, how can you trust anything else they say?

I think there must be a name for this that’s a lot stronger than mere indifference.

But one thing is for certain: it’s not love.

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

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

"I see dead people": Victorian post-mortem photography

There's a slightly macabre story about the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a man so dissipated he expired from chronic alcoholism in his late 30s. (His last words purportedly were, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that's the record.") Lionized in America, he found the seductions of the White Horse pub a little too much for him and keeled over with a brain hemorrhage. His widow Caitlin recalls that when his body was being shipped back to Wales for burial, some of the deckhands noticed his coffin and sat down around it to play a spirited game of poker.

"How Dylan would have loved that!" she exclaimed.

Indeed.

The coffin in the picture above doesn't contain Dylan Thomas.  More likely the photo depicts one of those Irish wakes where they like to prop up the body with a drink in its hand and carouse all night long.  It does not really qualify as post-mortem photography except in the broadest sense: the subject is someone who is being memorialized in a permanent and significant way.

 

Before we look at any more of these, let's quote the Great and Powerful Wikipedia:

Post-mortem photography (also known as memorial portraiture or memento mori) is the practice of photographing the recently deceased.

The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made portraiture much more commonplace, as many of those who were unable to afford the commission of a painted portrait could afford to sit for a photography session. This cheaper and quicker method also provided the middle class with a means for memorializing dead loved ones.

These photographs served less as a reminder of mortality than as a keepsake to remember the deceased. This was especially common with infants and young children; Victorian era childhood mortality rates were extremely high, and a post-mortem photograph might have been the only image of the child the family ever had. The later invention of the carte de visite, which allowed multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that copies of the image could be mailed to relatives.

The practice eventually peaked in popularity around the end of the 19th century and died out as "snapshot" photography became more commonplace, although a few examples of formal memorial portraits were still being produced well into the 20th century.

The earliest post-mortem photographs are usually close-ups of the face or shots of the full body and rarely include the coffin. The subject is usually depicted so as to seem in a deep sleep, or else arranged to appear more lifelike. Children were often shown in repose on a couch or in a crib, sometimes posed with a favorite toy or other plaything. It was not uncommon to photograph very young children with a family member, most frequently the mother. Adults were more commonly posed in chairs or even braced on specially-designed frames. Flowers were also a common prop in post-mortem photography of all types.

The effect of life was sometimes enhanced by either propping the subject's eyes open or painting pupils onto the photographic print, and many early images (especially tintypes and ambrotypes) have a rosy tint added to the cheeks of the corpse.

Later examples show less effort at a lifelike appearance, and often show the subject in a coffin. Some very late examples show the deceased in a coffin with a large group of funeral attendees; this type of photograph was especially popular in Europe and less common in the United States.

I knew nothing of this practice, one which seems so macabre by today's standards, until I stumbled upon it while searching for something else on YouTube. A lot of the videos contained severe warnings about content (so of course I had to look).

And it's true that on the surface of it, the images seem creepy and provoke a visceral response. We're not used to seeing dead people, except perhaps at open-casket funerals. Not used to seeing them arranged like furniture or braced so they could stand up beside their living kin.

But some sites devoted to this strange practice claim (correctly, I think) that post-mortem photography reflects a fascinating and very significant cultural shift in attitudes toward mortality. Death was much closer then, and less sanitized; people died in their beds, were washed and dressed and prepared for burial by loved ones. The camera was magic in those days, a way to paint an instant portrait, but not to be used lightly due to scarcity and cost (i.e. no one owned a camera then; you went to a portrait studio in your best clothing, stood very still, and didn't smile).

The babies are the saddest, of course. Victorian women must have gone through agony in their childbearing years, with primitive or non-existent obstetrics, high mortality rates and a complete absence of birth control. Almost everyone would lose an infant, more likely several. Were people more hardened to loss back then? I doubt it. They had to put their grief somewhere, just as we have to today.

They needed something to hold on to, a memento.  Because there were no Kodak moments then, no digital cameras or cells or any of the gadgets with which we so casually snap a picture, there would be no record of Junior's first smile or first steps or first day of school.

The post-mortem photograph, the only existing image of a baby or a child or even an adult, would be cherished and preserved for generations (as witness the thousands of images I found on the internet). I can feel the melancholy behind this gesture, the aching grief in the attempt to make a dead infant appear "lifelike". 

These waxen dolls are disturbing, but only if seen through our modern abhorrence of anything to do with death. We die in hospitals now, often alone. Life is prolonged past the point of any real meaning: we do it because we can, which has come to mean that we're supposed to, that there's no other choice. Death is the enemy, to be beaten back as long and fiercely as possible.

People "fight" cancer, "triumph" over it or "lose the battle". The medical community seems embarrassed by it all. Disease isn't supposed to happen, and if it does, it must be vanquished. I don't think the Victorians thought in terms of losing battles, or even winning. The majority of them were deeply Christian, which means they believed the dead were gathered up by the Almighty and transported to a better place for all eternity.

Spiritualism became tremendously popular in this era, along with the belief that the ghosts of loved ones sometimes appeared in photos.  And they did, if the photographer knew what he was doing.

The Victorians knew that life and death were separated not by a doorway or a passageway but by a gossamer veil, something the merest breeze could draw aside. These eerie portraits of life-in-death convey a sense of dwelling in that mysterious other world even while still embodied on earth. It's a bizarre and even repugnant concept to us, but not to them.

I try to imagine it. It's hard to go there, to put myself there. I wonder what it would be like to touch a dead baby, to tenderly position it for a portrait under blazing lights, to hold its likeness close for years and years while other children came and went.

Their haunted eyes seem to stare at us through time, through space, even through the mists of death itself.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. Many of these photos have been blogged and reblogged, pinned and repinned so many times that it was impossible for me to discover their true provenance, which fills me with regret. There was a time when these pictures were incalculably precious to someone and, in fact, irreplaceable. Try to see them in that light.

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Sexual abuse: truth and consequences, part 1

This post is very long, but I find that editing it is difficult. It wades into a highly controversial issue that has probably taken a few years off my life:  should we always believe accusations of childhood sexual abuse, even when their source is potentially unreliable?


The article below (I've had to put it in a separate post because the line-spacing in THIS post got so hopelessly buggered-up) is based on an enthralling documentary on ABC TV's 20-20 about Aislinn Wendrow, a young autistic woman who supposedly made allegations of sexual abuse against her father. I say "supposedly" because the allegations came about in a very strange and convoluted way. Severely disabled and non-verbal, Aislinn's entire education up to college level had been accomplished by a method in which her hand was guided over a keyboard by a practitioner trained in "facilitated communication".


There is a fey mysterious quality to Aislinn, as if she dwells in a different kind of reality, one more subtle than that which can be punched out on a keyboard. Nevertheless, the family saw the new method as a blessing and a breakthrough, tapping into their daughter's hidden intellectual gifts and feelings. Then came the baffling accusations of abuse, a horrifying ordeal in which the girl's father was placed in solitary confinement for nearly three months without being convicted of anything.  Though he was eventually cleared of all wrongdoing, the family was left devastated and completely disillusioned with what must have seemed like an educational boondoggle.

Facilitated communication is a slippery slope. In theory, it should (or at least could) work: the practitioner guides the disabled person's hand, supposedly without coercion or force, assisting them in typing out their thoughts and allowing them to communicate, sometimes for the first time. In spite of the fact that it does not stand up to any sort of scientific testing, some parents of disabled children are still hanging on to the method with bulldog tenacity. Though one can hardly blame them for trying to maintain their hope, I can't help but be reminded of the "theory" that childhood vaccines cause autism.


This is one of those wild ideas that was thrown out there and took hold in the popular imagination. The doctor who originally published the idea has since been completely discredited and his paper withdrawn. But never mind: celebrity Moms, most notably ex-Playboy centrefold Jenny McCarthy, had already embraced the idea and written several "heartwarming" books about it. The public loves heartwarming and wants to believe, even in the face of the facts.

McCarthy believes some autistic kids (including her son) are
"indigo" or "crystal" children with unique psychic abilities. This appreciation seems to fly in the face of her fury over vaccinations: would she prefer her son be not-so-special? If he had been just an ordinary kid, at least three bestsellers never would have been written (or, using another psychic metaphor, "ghostwritten").


But back to the topic at hand. For reasons I don't need to explain, the issue of childhood sexual abuse is like a quagmire in a minefield. I know that the truth can get buried, and victims can be flipped around into perpetrators, people who "destroyed the family" by even thinking that their parents might have abused them. The so-called False Memory Syndrome movement in the early '90s (which, mysteriously, you don't hear about any more) made my teeth ache. I couldn't help but see perpetrators hiding out in this organization, which after all was nothing but a lobby group with no valid research to back up their claims.

But if you try hard enough, and search long enough, you'll find something that passes for proof. People are incredibly stubborn about their beliefs, and many of them can't or won't admit they are wrong.


Once the pendulum swings one way, it can swing forcefully the other way, knocking whole families over for life. False Memory Syndrome reminded me of high school physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the early '90s there was an unprecedented outpouring of sexual abuse stories in the media, particularly on talk shows where hosts like Ricki Lake and Sally Jesse Raphael sat transfixed by extreme stories of multiple personality caused by Satanic ritual abuse.

Then, bingo-boingo, here comes "FMS" to knock the pendulum
violently the other way. Some women (including some I knew personally) were so relieved to put down their emotional burden that they recanted accusations which I am convinced were valid.

But how many were valid? How many imagined or coerced? How
many "implanted" by unscrupulous therapists? Dear God, have we
learned nothing at all? For here it comes again, the idea that someone can concoct traumatic memories and make them seem real. The most disturbing element, in my mind, is that these "facilitators" don't necessarily set out to do harm. Their unconscious motivation to help their client leads them to put words in their mouths and ideas in their heads, up to and including sexual abuse which never took place.


How could this possibly work? It could. It's kind of like a ouija board. That pointer isn't going anywhere without the touch of human hands.

I am sure I don't have the last word on this contentious issue, but it has affected my family and will continue to affect me for the rest of my life.  Aislinn's story is completely enthralling, and provides one more piece in an increasingly baffling, disturbing puzzle.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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