Does this-all look like a fish?

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What if Alden Nowlan kept a blog?

This is just a small, slight scrapbook. Wispy knowledge of Alden Nowlan that floats in my memory like random thistledown: remembering that he looked like an English teacher I used to have (or that the teacher looked like him), that he was a famous Canadian poet with a short life, that he came from appalling poverty and emotional neglect. In other words, an artist. Then this discovery of a poem - I began to read it just tonight, and I kept thinking, by God that's a lot like a poem I "took" in school, years and years ago - and with every line I thought, "God, he must be a plagiarist or something because this is SO much like the poem I took in school," and then with those last two lines, "his axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills/aching with empty strength and throttled rage", realizing that this WAS the poem I took, and that up until this moment I had no idea that more than 40 years ago, I had read and been seized by a poem written by Alden Nowlan.

Every angel is terrifying

Every angel is terrifying. And yet alas

I invoked you almost deadly birds of the soul
knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias
when one of you veiling his radiance stood at the front door
slightly disguised for the journey no longer appalling;
(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).

But if the archangel now perilous from behind the stars
took even one step down toward us: our own heart beating
higher and higher would bear us to death. Who are you?

Rainer Maria Rilke

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If you go down in the flood (it's gonna be your own fault)

This photo has been doing the internet rounds. Since I've owned both cats and birds, I can relate. I like the spread-out paw on the "mouse" (heh-heh) with claws just showing, along with the tip of the tongue. This is funny, but it illustrates a point, the kind Chris Hansen has dealt with on Dateline.

On the internet, you can be whoever-the-hell you want to be.

On Facebook, I've seen the kind of swagger I don't think I would ever see in person. Quite often it takes the form of blatant personal narcissism. More than once I've seen women "model" dresses they're going to wear to awards banquets (awards they're shortlisted for, they always point out). I've seen shoes, I've seen handbags, but the dresses are the worst. The women are either posed seductively with one shoulder-strap falling down,  staring into the camera in a predatory manner (and these are usually women over 60), or draped over the hood of a car with their tits up like Jane Russell.  A few are posed in the t-square, 3/4 position we were all told to assume in the Nancy 
Taylor Charm Course. 

I recently saw a post by a woman who described herself, or at least her dress, as "gorgeous". She was well into middle age, stout, and wore a floral dress that made her look like a sofa.

But the point is: would she walk into a dinner party and say, "Look, everybody. Aren't I gorgeous?" Yet in every single case, her sycophants chorused things like, "Awesome!" "You go, girl!" and things like that. 

What does this mean?

It means that the narcissism gene which is latent in most of us has been given free rein. Once again we can go to our own birthday party in a fluffy dress and swing our feet in their Mary Janes, squeaking, "Ooooh, look at me, everybody! I'm prettier than you!"

Well. . . no.

So what's wrong with praising your own beauty? Haven't mental health care professionals been honking at us for decades to love ourselves, to see ourselves as innately worthy no matter what we do? Why has this always bothered me? Because it's sickening, that's why. It's shallow and essentially untrue. At the heart of most people (and believe me, after 60 years on the planet I know this) lies darkness.

Civilization means subjugating this darkness whenever we can.

I saw a ridiculous program the other night called The History of the World in Two Hours. It was stupid because it was really at least two programs in one, and should have been called The Vastly-Oversimplified History of the Universe, followed by Why Humans Feel Entitled to Completely Destroy the World.

The early physics blather was almost OK, though since I'm married to a man with a Masters in biochemistry, I saw glaring errors in it. How did the first cells of life ever wink into existence? It wasn't explained at all. Suddenly there was this big sloppy edit in the middle of the show, and then they were talking about DNA (a nonsensical leap over the Grand Canyon, since it hadn't been set up at all). 

There was absolutely nothing about the various theories of how life began (and after all, since nobody was around with a Smartphone snapping photos, our information comes down to educated guesses). The most plausible guess involves the existence of chemicals in seawater which gradually formed tiny strands of nucleic acid. Not DNA, not by any stretch, but perhaps its multi-billions-of-years'-distant cousin. 

There was, however, a lot of comical blather from "scientists", the usual suspects rounded up (including a guy with a grey beard and an Indiana Jones hat who looks like Gabby Hayes, and who is on EVERY science show to explain paleontology in ludicrously dumbed-down terms) to tell us all that "bacteria are our common ancestor. We ALL came from bacteria. No, really!"

There were things even more offensive than the idea that cold germs were our great-great-great-googol-grandparents (and yes, you fucking idiots, I AM spelling that right - "google" is a misspelling, not deliberate but just goddamn stupid). Massive chunks were left out of this "history", such as anything to do with art or even valid science. No astronomy, no medicine, no nothing. It was all (ALL) technology and how wonderful Man was to have invented these marvelous things. 

It got worse. Never once were women mentioned. I have heard a quite plausible theory that women invented agriculture. While Thugg and Uck were out there trying to kill water buffalo by throwing rocks at them, the women were doing the spectacularly unimportant task of bringing the next generation of humans into the world. As they did so, they were constantly gathering the plant sources that kept the tribe alive while Thugg and Uck killed each other because they didn't know how to throw. 

Being smart survivors and tied to the soil, women noticed over time that they could actually coax things to grow where they wanted. Guess what this lead to! But no! This whole program was dedicated to shallow, self-congratulatory male strutting, exalting the technology which is now on the verge of destroying us all. 

It was all good, you see. All swagger, male swagger in particular. The internal combustion engine was held up as the very pinnacle of man's amazing achievements, with no mention at all of the megatons of poison it belches into the air every single day.

Anyway, to me it was just a reflection of the shallow narcissism and lack of touch with reality we now see everywhere. I wonder, honestly wonder if the human race isn't being seriously and permanently degraded. As the ice caps continue their relentless melt (and why on earth are they melting? Why do we get all these freakish floods and tornados? I'm sure I don't know), most of the European treasures of art and architecture on which human culture was supposedly founded will be swept away forever. We'll have a few reproductions left, probably posted on Facebook, and after all, aren't they just as good?

Bob Dylan said it thirty years ago: "If you go down in the flood, it's gonna be your own fault." As usual, the little bastard was right.

P. S. A rather sickening coda, sickening to me because once again it reflects the happily ignorant, slipshod quasi-knowledge that abounds in this wonderful century. Speaking of how it all began, get a load of this internet explanation:

The story of Google – Sergey Brin and Larry Page; what started as the two of them looking for a project to do their final paper. It was a requirement for them to get their Phd degrees in Stanford. Sergey and Larry found that there is a problem on the current (in mid 90’s) search engine. The search results were non-efficiency and the result was coming up at a slow speed. So they decided to pick that as their project to do their Phd paper on.  

 Sergey and Larry started to look at the search technology based on a new idea: A relevant result comes from context. They started their own search engine (they called it ‘Back Rub’) as a test servicing the Campus. Eventually their search engine project got so big and that they have to move it out of the Stanford Campus. Both Sergey and Larry left Stanford to take care of their booming business.

One day the young men were brain storming for a name for their company. And Larry said Google – It means the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred Zeros. So they did a Domain Look up and registered Google.com right away. Later Larry and Sergey realized that the spelling on their Domain name was misspelled. The correct spelling is “Googol” But does it matter!?

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Harold. . . are you there?

Do you see? Do you see now? Do you see why I'm going crazy?

Ever since I wrote my third novel The Glass Character, at the heart of which is the life and career of silent screen legend Harold Lloyd, I have been haunted. Or else enchanted.

I wrote recently about seeing a TV ad for Cover Girl cosmetics featuring a glamorous model hanging off the hands of a huge clock. Obviously a Harold Lloyd stunt.






And I've already told you, repeatedly because it scares me so much, about Lloyd synchronicity, the repetition of the name and image of Harold Lloyd which has been going on for a couple of years and is now a daily occurrence.

Just a little while ago I was meandering around in a good/bad site called, appropriately, So Bad So Good, mostly featuring oddball collections of photos. Boring, boring, flip, flip. I saved one or two. Then. My God.

It was a very strange, almost inexplicable picture of a man sitting on the ledge of a clock tower, with Harold dangling off the hands of a clock below. This was supposed to be part of a feature called 3D Images. The weird thing is, Harold Lloyd was one of the first 3D photographers, and in his lifetime took literally hundreds of thousands of shots (mostly of naked women). More convergence, or synchronicity, or whatever you call it.

But why. . . ? Is there really a Lloyd revival going on that I knew nothing about? Why does he so often pop up in pop culture, so to speak?

My knees have turned to jelly, and I have that plenty-weird, frustrated, almost angry feeling I get several times a day now. Tell me. . . what does it all mean?

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No, use the RED phone!: Computer ads in 1981

Best moments/split-seconds:

The Critter Knitter strikes again!

This year, the challenge was on: what could I knit for Erica and Lauren for their birthdays that would be unique, special, and suited to their personalities? Lauren likes to play a chasing/screaming game called 

Elephant Man, so I undertook my first elephant. It was big. It was grey. It took a long time. Trunk to tail, he measures more than two feet long. During his construction I came down feverish, and he began to freak me out. I thought he was going to start walking.

Erica has been asking for a unicorn for a LONG time. She's just a unicorn kind of girl. I couldn't find a pattern, in fact couldn't even find a workable horse pattern, so had to adapt a zebra. He looks fine here, but falls over due to a very large head. Personally I like his gold-tasseled blanket and the star pendant around his neck that you can't see. All mystical.

I have very little experience with dollmaking - did an angel doll for Christmas, but what else? Oh yes, Harold Lloyd, the juju who sits on my desk. Dolls potentially contain a lot of power, especially "likeness" dolls, and they must be handled carefully. I infused each of these dolls (Lauren, left; Erica, right) with the spirits of the girls I was giving them to. Making the clothes was fun, too. Here they wear their hippie fun-fur coats.

It pays to accessorize! I did these little handbags freehand, and stuffed them with "fuzzbugs", little knitted caterpillars you make with the Wonder Knitter. Lauren shrieked with delight when she found hers. I also made long fuzzy scarves, but didn't photograph them because they completely cover the dolls' faces.

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER!

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REVEALED: Strangest "separated at birth" EVER!

Can't you see it? It's the beak.

Twilight Zone: fifteen seconds of terror

OK, so. Here's how this started. I sort of go on and off some things, for example, The Twilight Zone, which I like watching (sometimes) because I remembered watching it as a little kid and being scared out of my mind. I wasn't allowed to watch it coz it was too scary, but I watched it anyway, or I had my older brother Arthur describe them to me, which was sometimes even better than the show.

He also described a show called Medic, which I now realize had Richard Boone in it whom I later liked in Have Gun, Will Travel and Hec Ramsey. At the time Medic was considered extreme because it dramatized medical procedures that you weren't a-spozed-ta know about. I never did see Medic, though I did find out something about gangrene.

With The Twilight Zone, everyone remembers certain episodes. They just stick in your mind somehow. This is unusual because the show went on for years and years and must have had hundreds of episodes. I'm watching them again on a very strange Newfoundland channel I stumbled on the other day. It's supposed to be "Canada's Superstation", but it isn't even in HD and has the most lame local programming, wrestling shows and entertainment hostesses with strong Newfie accents. 

Every night they show something called Scenes of Newfoundland, and it's always the same old guy singing a sea shanty and shots of a golf course. I won't get into the other shows, such as Newfoundland and Labrador Paranormal, which consists of two guys in lumberjackets sitting on the floor of a kitchen at night smoking cigarettes and yelling, "Hey! Come out of there!"

But they do show The Twilight Zone every night, which is what got me watching them again.

Rod Serling strikes me as an earlier incarnation of Stephen King, with his squinty-eyed looks and odd voice, his slight creepishness which - well, did he really talk that way all the time? When he talked to his mother, for example? Never mind. Certain episodes stick in your head, and in my case I think it was exactly three.

The one EVERYBODY remembers is the guy on the plane, the nuts guy just out of the asylum who starts seeing a giant teddy bear running around on the wing. It's one of the early examples of Shatnerian excess, and it's wondrous to behold. We forget how beautiful Shatner was back then, a real matinee idol - this was well before Captain Kirk, don't forget, when his hair had already begun to thin and his waistline to expand. (And isn't it strange how he has more hair now than he did then?)

There are a couple more Shatner episodes in the series in which he's much more subdued, but no less a fox. I always watch out for them.

This is a personal favorite because I like watching people fall out of windows. Three do in this episode, but this is the important one. In fact, I think four do, cuz the French guy ends up falling out too, but you know what? I left to get a drink of water, so we'll never know.

This one, though. It's the ultimate, the one I will remember on my deathbed, about the meek little man whose wife bosses him around and doesn't let him read, and then there's a nuclear war and all of a sudden he has all the books he wants, and all the TIME he wants, and his glasses fall down and then. . . When I saw it this last time, it was interesting because I had forgotten all about the giant clock lying on the ground. Of late I've been reflecting on such things, not just time but the way we keep time (as if we can keep it!) and try to clutch on to it. The surrealistic clock images in Safety Last! and Metropolis have a strange kinship with this dark dystopia, this blasted library full of books so long overdue they're nearly vaporized. I will leave to better minds the profound existential significance of that Cover Girl ad.

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TERROR AT MONSTER HIGH!

Terror at Monster High!

A Nanny Tale

(Author's note: written for Erica and Lauren's birthday party yesterday!)

One day Erica and Lauren were playing with their Monster High dolls. They had a lot of Monster High dolls, about six million of them. It was raining outside and they were bored.

“What if WE could be Monster High dolls? Wouldn’t that be fun?” Erica asked.

“No. It would be scary. It’s a bad idea.”

“It’s a great idea. I’m going to wish I was a Monster High doll.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Lauren warned her.

But Erica did not listen.

“I wish I was a Monster High doll. I wish I was a Monster High doll,” Erica chanted over and over again.

“No, you’re doing it wrong,” Lauren said. “You have to have a wishbone or a star or something, to wish on.”

”I thought you said it was a bad idea.”

”I want to see if it works on you first.”

“I know! I’ll wish on Autumn.”

So poor Autumn had to stay still while Erica wished on her.

“I wish I was a Monster High doll. I wish I was a Monster High doll.”

“Hey wait a minute, you have to decide WHICH Monster High doll you want to be,” Lauren reminded her.

“I want to be able to change into different dolls any time I want to.”

“Oh-oh,” thought Lauren. “This girl is going to get into trouble.”

But just then, a strange sort of mist wafted into the room. It was green and didn’t smell very good.

“Did you fart?” asked Lauren, very disgusted.

“No, I didn’t. It means the spell is beginning to work.”

Erica had a very weird feeling. It felt like she was turning into someone else!

Then, suddenly. . .

POOF!

“You look a little different,” Lauren commented.

”You have to try this, it’s neat! Just wish on Autumn!” But by this time Autumn had run upstairs to use the litter box.

“Just wish on anything, then,” Erica told her.

“OK. I wish on Blah, Blah, Blah.”

Poof!  She had turned into a Monster High doll!

“Let’s test it out. I want to change dolls now. POOF!”

POOF!

It worked! The girls could change into any doll they wanted to.

But then something strange happened.

They heard  footsteps.

Thud. Thud. Thud, down the stairs. Who could it be? A giant? A witch?

Could this be Autumn? Oh, no! She was hideous! She looked like a monster!

She must have been caught in the spell!

“Quick, undo the spell,” Erica cried.

“Hey, you started this!”

“Autumn, I wish you would stop looking so scary!”

POOF!

Then something even worse happened.

There was something moving under the sofa. It had a lot of legs.

Autumn reached under the sofa with her paw and dragged it out.

IT WAS THE BIGGEST, WORST,  MOST DISGUSTING BUG 
THAT EVER LIVED!

“Look how big,” Lauren screamed.

“And how disgusting.”

“But we’re supposed to like things like that.”

Then Autumn put her paw under the sofa again.

“No, Autumn, NO!” the girls cried in unison. But it happened again.

Now there were TWO disgusting bugs!

“Look!” Erica pointed to the back yard. It was full of a million bugs!

“I’m not going out in that,” Lauren said.

“And look at those scary cats.!”

“They must be Autumn’s new friends.”

"We have to get out of this spell. Put me back to the way I was, put me back to the way I was. . .”

“It won’t work. Autumn is one of them now. There’s no way out.”

Lauren tried to scream. . . but no sound would come out.

Erica realized that what Lauren was telling her was true: they would be Monster High dolls for the rest of their lives. It might be fun, but there would be a lot of bugs.

Then suddenly, Mummy and Daddy appeared in the door.

But they didn’t look like Mummy and Daddy.

AT ALL.

Something had changed. Mummy and Daddy were MONSTER HIGH DOLLS, just like all the rest of them!

“I told you this was a bad idea,” said Lauren.

“How are we going to get out of this?”

”Daddy looks weird,” said Erica in a low voice.

It was true. Daddy looked weird, and he was getting weirder. Mummy looked so strange, you couldn’t tell who she was.

Suddenly a million bugs began to crawl all over the floor! Everyone was swallowed up in a green fog! Help, help!

”AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”

”I want to go back to the way I was. I want to go back to the way I was.” Everyone began to chant this over and over again, even Autumn. Then the giant disgusting bugs began to chant along with them. Suddenly. . .

POOF!

Had it all been a dream? It was as if nothing had happened at all. Everyone was back the way they had been before the Terror at Monster High.

“I don’t know,” Erica said to Lauren. “I think it was kind of fun.”

“You think it was fun? Then how about THIS?” 

She pulled a giant bug out from under her shirt and stuck it down Erica’s back. Erica screamed and ran out of the room so fast she left a trail of fire.

“I told  her to be careful what she wished for,” said Lauren to herself with a smile.

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