Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Circus accidents



The Wallendas and the queer melancholy that trails behind the circus performer seem to be a recurring obsession. I hate circuses. As a child I hated them, and was thought odd. It was that smell, the smell of shit and failed animals. Living in a small town, the circuses I saw were moth-eaten and tawdry, which is perhaps what it's all about anyway. Elephants tied up. Lions waiting for a lunge that never happens. Mean alcoholic clowns. Oh, the clowns especially - they are a nightmare.

There is YouTube footage of Karl Wallenda falling to his death from a tightrope suspended between two high-rises in Rio de Janiero or somewhere, I mean the real thing - it couldn't be faked, he falls. It's the end for him. And his grandson or great-grandson Nik Wallenda keeps on trying for it. One wonders at the symbolism. Trying for a fall, or, like a compulsive gambler, going on and on until he loses everything.  Craven cowards that we are, we still risk death each time we walk out the door. Or don't walk out the door. We don't test it, don't push the risk, unless you count too many sour-cream-and-onion chips or hours spent sitting in a chair.




"Fails" are great tests, tests of character I mean, and most of us fail them. It's just too painful, everybody watching. Everybody has their own particular bag of fails. Mine is my writing. After years and years of refining my craft, publishing hundreds of book reviews and thousands of newspaper columns, my dream "came true" and I published a novel - then two - then three - and then - they didn't sell. Nobody told me, you see, that the novels had to SELL, because part of the dream for every writer I know is automatic Fame and Fortune. Surely this just happens all by itself?

Fail.

 It's sad, and infuriating sometimes, but it's not going to happen for me - the movie version, I mean, because luck just does not stick to me. Like Peter Pan's shadow, it keeps coming unstuck just as I start to get somewhere.  Real trauma is something quite else, and I am able to put this aside and enjoy my life to a degree I never thought possible a few years ago. So is the fail entirely a fail?




Nothing can take away from me the bizarre and ongoing discovery, the process, the burrowing in. Now that I have YouTube and Wikipedia and cool things like that, it's unending. It's labyrinthine, and more odd than the human condition itself, which I both love and loathe. I am drawn to those on the fringes, because I have bloody well given up on being acceptable to anyone but myself (so there), even while seeing that other people's oddness, like mine, might be offputting. As Steinbeck used to say, it's shrimp ice cream.




I saw someone's blog the other day - God, it was beautiful and elegant, like the rooftop penthouse of some gleamingly expensive apartment building in Manhattan, all sort of skyline-y, and the entries were all so gracefully ordered. It just had Professional written all over it. The screaming harridan in me, the rotten mother I carry around in my head, began yammering, "WHY CAN'T YOU BE MORE LIKE YOUR SISTER?", or words to that effect. In other words - your blog sucks, Margaret, stop pretending, start writing like a grownup and maybe THEN you will sell a few copies.

Oh really?

29 rather than 24?

I might as well do whatever the hell I want. Yes, and while still admiring someone else's truly stunning masterpiece of a blog, full of beautifully polished entries on topics of major interest, instead of quirky things on circus accidents and other stuff that usually involves making a lot of gifs.




You shouldn't go on YouTube late at night and watch circus accidents.  It's not fun for all ages. It's not fun for anyone. You'll find falls and wipeouts and awful cat maulings (serves them goddamn right, I'm for the cats). You'll find some where you're not sure the person even survived. After one particularly awful motorcycle crash, the emcee pleads in a nakedly urgent voice that if there is a doctor in the house, PLEASE, come forward NOW. "This is not part of the show." Then he dismisses the crowd, who are almost completely silent.

Is it something Roman about us, a colosseum leftover, something untamed, do we like a thrill, do we like to watch a thrill, THEIR thrill, or do we secretly hope in the most shameful part of ourselves that something in fact will go terribly wrong? For in a circus, it's hard for things to go just a little bit wrong.



Then there is the sideshow. These still exist in the small backwoods circuses that probably operate on the fringes of the law, though they supposedly emphasize feats of strength or daring rather than freakish characteristics. If we see someone walking on his hands now, our response is  likely to be, "Wow, that's pretty amazing," marvelling at the fact that his disability really isn't very disabling after all. But back then. . . back then, when "abnormal" children were generally not allowed to draw their first breath, when people afflicted with "madness" were "put away" so we wouldn't have to see them, the freak show must have been a visceral nightmare.




This is two or three seconds of Todd Browning's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks. For years I avoided it because I was put off by the title (which makes better sense once you've seen it - it's more of a quote, something screamed at the performers by the prima donna aerialist) and was a little frightened of the whole concept because it starred REAL circus performers, "human oddities" - but then one day curiosity got the better of me.

When you see Freaks, you enter a strange world. Fully half an hour was edited out, or censored out, so as rich and strange as it already is, it might once have been much more rich and strange. You have to see it more than once to really appreciate the fact that it's about a community, a very tight-knit one where there is solidarity and protectiveness and intense loyalty to one another. All the things we're lousy at in today's fragmentary society. There's oddball humor, scenes which are not so much meant to shock as to inspire a headshaking wonder, and - as with most great movies, up to and including Gone with the Wind - a love triangle.

I could do a whole post on Freaks, in fact I might at some point, and I was not even aware until just now that my recent viewing of it on TCM probably triggered this whole awful doomed circus search. Unlikely as this seems, the movie isn't "dark" or "disturbing" or "macabre" - none of those terms apply, as most of the troupe are good-humoured and seem to enjoy their work and each other. I will say though that it is plenty weird and a little crazy, demonstrating an over-the-top exuberance unfettered by any bounds of propriety. Only the ending turns dark, terribly dark, and only because somebody dared to mess with one of their own.





 



Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


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Sunday, November 9, 2014

You were right, Billy Bob - forgive us





I've been trying very hard NOT to write about Jian Ghomeshi, but it's been difficult, bombarded as I am by Facebook links and such. But this Toronto Star piece from 2009 now resonates in a whole new way. Back then, Ghomeshi was the darling boy of the CBC, supposedly rescuing it from its loyal and longstanding audience of unhip boomers (horrors!) and attracting a whole new crowd of multi-pierced-and-tattoed hipster doofuses. In fact, so long as they were younger, it didn't really matter what they looked like.

It just wasn't cool to diss Ghomeshi. Everybody loved him. You HAD to love him, or you looked unhip. I'd say "nobody knew what an asshole he was behind the scenes", but the truth is, plenty of people knew and kept their mouths shut in craven cowardice. Everyone was afraid of him. He was a serial grabbist, assault artist and head-puncher/choker who terrified women into keeping silent for fear of losing their jobs or, worse, losing their credibility forever.

So Billy Bob Thornton was reviled for calling Ghomeshi an "asshole", but I cannot think of a better description of the man. Billy Bob recently made a surprise guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory, which many call the coolest thing on TV, while Ghomeshi is cowering under a bed somewhere, maybe in a BDSM club in some anonymous basement in Etobicoke.

Stick to your guns for long enough, and eventually you just might win out.

By: Raju Mudhar Tech Reporter, Kenyon Wallace Published on Fri Apr 10 2009




Billy Bob not done with the barbs


Billy Bob Thornton elicited boos and catcalls last night at Massey Hall as he attempted to explain his bizarre behaviour during an interview on CBC Radio on Wednesday.

Referring to Jian Ghomeshi, the host of CBC Radio's Q, as an "a--hole," the Oscar-winning actor turned musician interrupted his band's set three songs in to give his side of the story.

After commenting on the beautiful theatre and the legendary performer they were opening for (Willie Nelson), Thornton said, "It seems as if when I say something it's in the news."

When that drew boos, Thornton continued: "Boo all you want, but I want to say something.... We're really happy to be here, but I need to say something. I talked to this a--hole yesterday.

"I sat down and talked with this guy. He and his producers say, `We promise you we won't say that' (meaning references to Thornton's acting career). The very first thing they said was that.

"I don't really like sensationalism," he added. "If you look someone in the eyes and promise them something, and you don't do it, you don't get the interview. That's the way it goes."




The explanation was met by further boos and catcalls of, "Here comes the gravy," a reference to Thornton's description of Canadian audiences as "mashed potatoes with no gravy" during his interview with Ghomeshi.

Before the show, Thornton told a Star reporter that he "loves Canada." When asked what he meant by the mashed potatoes comment, Thornton, wearing a thick layer of skin-tone facial makeup and sucking on a cigarette, said: "I was talking about the guy who was interviewing me."

The interview, which featured Thornton claiming he didn't know what some of Ghomeshi's questions meant, responding to others with non-sequiturs, then chastising Ghomeshi for referring to the actor's film career, has gone viral.

More than 600,000 viewers had watched the clip on YouTube by 8 p.m. yesterday, while a CBC spokesperson said the network had received roughly 3,700 blog responses and emails. Before last night's show, the second in which the Boxmasters opened for Nelson and Ray Price, several fans were miffed at Thornton's radio performance.

"He's an a--hole," said Nick Goodman of Aurora. "He was probably drinking backstage or something."



Danny Duckworth of Toronto said he likes Thornton as a comedian and actor, but "I couldn't care less what he thinks. If I want to get up and dance, that's my choice," he added, a reference to Thornton's comment that Canadians just sort of sit there.

"If Billy Bob doesn't like it, he should quit."

Ghomeshi could not be reached for comment last night. Earlier yesterday, he said it was one of the most difficult interviews he's ever done and he was taken aback at Thornton's strange responses (sample: when Ghomeshi asked when the Boxmasters were formed, Thornton answered, "I'm not sure what that means").

Ghomeshi also said it would have been irresponsible to his audience not to mention Thornton's acting past during his introduction (he did not ask any questions about acting during the interview).




"Our policy is that we don't allow anybody to tell us what we can and cannot say," said Ghomeshi. "Beyond that, it was this notion and the language that he used during the interview that I thought was unfortunate, that we were `instructed' to say this and that. And I think that does raise interesting questions about ideas around how much journalism is to be controlled, especially when it comes to arts and entertainment and culture, and I think that that's a concern.

"The reality is, and I tried to explain this in the interview, these guys have only been together for two years. You just don't get the kind of national press they are getting without the incentive being something like his career past.... And I think if he could graciously accept that and say, `Hey, I want to focus on the music, but I get that the reason we're here is because I'm a movie star that's won an Oscar.' There's not a lot of people who can say that."




Ghomeshi felt like he was "in the middle of a tsunami" yesterday. He was being interviewed by media around the world. "The nice thing is the reaction that I'm getting from journalists around the world that is really kind of sweet, but it is all very odd ... and a lot of people, especially in this country, seemed to support the way I did things," he said. "Maybe it was a little Canadian to be polite, but I can live with that."

Thornton's interview was being compared to the recent Joaquin Phoenix appearance, in which the actor turned rapper sulked through a chat on Late Show With David Letterman.

With files from The Canadian Press





 


Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


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Saturday, November 8, 2014

A great idea into my head came creeping




In this magical age of YouTube, everything comes around again. These Children's Record Guild rediscoveries are recordings I thought I'd never hear again. As a kid, they were epic tales that seemed to go on forever, so I'm surprised to see how short they are, some of them having only three or four minutes per side. Though I didn't post it here because it's in four parts, the Children's Record Guild version of Cinderella is full of the music of Prokofiev. It wasn't familiar to me then (for in spite of my classical music upbringing, the only Prokofiev I knew was Peter and the Wolf), but many years later I discovered, or rediscovered the ballet and got the strangest prickly feeling all over: yes, I had heard this music before, embedded in a story, or was the story embedded in the music? It took me a while to put the pieces together, and when I hear it now I realize how cleverly Prokofiev was adapted and spliced together with a minimalized version of one of the world's oldest fairy tales.




The Emperor's New Clothes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, Build me a House, Grandfather's Farm, Pedro in Brazil, Slow Joe, Let's Have a Party, and. . . the immortal Travels of Babar, that one was the best of all:

"I am an elephant actor." (Trumpet fanfare)

Greek chorus: "This elephant actor is going to make believe he is the brave King Babar."

"I am an elephant actress." (Trumpet fanfare)

Greek chorus: "This elephant actress is going to make believe she is the beautiful Queen Celeste."




These weren't just records, they were things to hold on to, companions, a means to get away from the hell of school and the scorn of my so-called friends. They come around again now in this unlikely form, something I couldn't even have imagined ten or fifteen years ago, and they're different somehow - they changed somewhere along the line. The character of Puss, once beloved, is now a smart-ass con with a thick, nasal accent, perhaps working-class Boston or New Yahhk. The cleverness of the songs and the way the stories move right along (they HAD to, at 3 1/2 minutes per side) are more apparent to me. I'm now the storyteller, not the "tellee", so I know a thing or two about the craft.

(Next day.  All this seemed familiar, as if I had written about it before. And lo, when I went digging, I found this:)

There is another association with articulate animals: the Children's Record Guild recording of a very strange, adulterated version of Puss in Boots. We had a number of these recordings, which originally came through the mail as a sort of record-of-the-month subscription. But this set of maybe thirty or forty records was bequeathed to us by someone who didn't want them anymore. Obviously they hadn't been played much: there was hardly a scratch on them. We soon took care of that.




Through the wonders of the internet, I've found some of these records and listened to them again for the first time in more than (blblblpphhht) years. The Travels of Babar, Slow Joe, Build Me a House, Robin Hood, etc. I even found a bizarre version of Pinocchio with Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney which we played half to death (though my recent posting about the hellscape of Winchell-Mahoney Timeexpresses my abhorrence of that particular entertainer, who always struck me as a son-of-a-bitch).

These reborn-through-the-internet kiddie records are miraculously pristine, with no World War III going on in the background. Someone must have preserved them in a vault somewhere, or found some way to remove all the scratches. Anyway, the one I most happily happened upon was Puss in Boots, the strangest re-imagining of the story I've ever heard. Puss, a cheeky little feline in seven-league boots, adopts this person named John and somehow renders him into a Prince by wangling an audience with the King. Sort of like that. But first of all, John is totally gobsmacked by the fact that THIS CAT CAN TALK!





Here is the Ballad of Puss, which we used to sing to each other endlessly. I just listened to it again (I had to convert an unplayable MP4 file into an MP3 for this, which took some doing), and made an effort to transcribe it: for you, precious reader, the gardenia that blooms in the innermost Eden of my heart, deserve to share it with me today.

When I was just a teeny-weeny kitty
Everyone told me that I looked so pretty
They said, 'beautiful eyes'
They said, 'lovely fur'
But all I could answer was 'meoowwww' or "purrrrrr"

My coat was black, my eyes of course were yellow
People always said 'what a charming fellow'
I wanted to thank them, but I didn't know how
For all I could answer was 'purrrrrrr' or 'meow'



Then one fine day as I was lying sleeping
A great idea into my head came creeping
A pussy cat that could learn to say 'meow'
Could say just 'me', by leaving off the 'ow!'

So I said me, me, me, me, me,
Then as you plainly can see
From me to he to she to we
Was just as simple as it could be
I practiced daily for a week
And that is how I learned to speak!

 Then I thought that I would try
Slipping off from me to my
From me to my to sky to why
Was just as easy as eating pie
I practiced daily for a week
And that is how I learned to speak!

Soon I was no longer a beginner,
When someone asked 'how would you like some dinner?'
If I wanted to answer, I could say 'yes sir!'
Instead of replying just, 
MeOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW
Or purrrrrrr.
Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.



And the following: more links to CRG recordings.

http://www.matthewlind.com/CRG.html


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Ten-second Cinema: Nosferatu in five easy takes

 


Hello, and welcome to your first lesson in German Expressionism. Here we have a very creepy fellow who doesn't look at all like a proper vampire, but nevertheless, that's what he's supposed to be.




Here at Ten-second Cinema, we stick to the good part. It saves a lot of time. Nosferatu really is creepy but anyone's standards. It all has to do with the lighting, and the apparent stillness of the creature. 




Here we have Ed Asner in an earlier incarnation, grabbing what must be a mosquito out of the air and eating it while a scientist and a dismayed constable look on.




Since it's hard, if not impossible to tell a story in ten-second snippets, I grab whatever arresting images I can find. Everyone's on edge here. Nosferatu seeks a creamy neck, and WILL find one soon.




I don't know why they don't just put him in the slammer here and now. He's obviously a pervert.




No one can explain why the titles are so crooked in this thing. But it gives away the ending. Critics have mentioned the eroticism in the story, and it's true that "offering her blood freely" is creepily - no, I won't say sexy, but fraught with something-or-other. The implication in vampire movies has always been that fear is entwined with desire. To be honest, if I had my pick, I'd choose Bela Lugosi. Or maybe even Grandpa Munster.



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Friday, November 7, 2014

Jian Ghomeshi, serial gropist




Right now, this is about all I can say about that narcissistic self-proclaimed Persian Prince, Jian Ghomeshi, a. k. a. the serial gropist and head-puncher who is now relegated to disgraced exile in - where IS he now, anyway? Whose bed is he hiding under - or in? And an even bigger dilemma: who'll host the Gillers this year? Find somebody stubbly and full of faux-hipster self-importance, quick!




Dear God - they've cancelled his new book, Why I Punch Women's Heads and Other Hobbies of the Hippest Man in Canada! What to do?




And they've cancelled this too, I'd imagine. Bad week for him. Jianny get angry, Jianny get mad! But that's not all. Somebody took a crowbar to his star on the very small and insignificant Canadian Sort-of Walk of Fame (But We're Sorry). They couldn't get it up, I mean out, so somebody had to use a jackhammer. His jilted ex-girlfriend was quoted as saying, "I wish they'd use it on his head."





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Mentally flossed




It should be plain I didn't write this. It was an item in that magnificent compendium of knowledge. Mental Floss. (Did you think I was going to say Wikipedia?) I have credited it properly, because there is no way in the world I could have come up with these. Some of them resemble words that still kick around in the junk drawer of English ('higgledy-piggledy", "pell-mell" "razzle-dazzle", and a few others). Some of them have the flavour of Cockney rhyming slang: "trouble and strife" for "wife", "ginger beer" for "queer", "Charley Dilk" for "milk" (and don't ask how I know these, but I didn't have to look them up).


Paul Anthony Jones

filed under: language, Words

In 1905, the Oxford University Press published the sixth and final volume of The English Dialect Dictionary, a compilation of local British words and phrases dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. The EDD set out to record all those words used too sparsely and too locally to make the cut in the Oxford English Dictionary, and by 1905, more than 70,000 entries from right across the British Isles had been compiled, defined, and explained. The entire enterprise was personally overseen (and, in its early stages at least, partly funded) by Joseph Wright, a self-taught linguist and etymologist who went from attending French and Latin night classes while working in a textiles factory to becoming Professor of Philology at Oxford University. Although Wright published a number of other works during his lifetime, The English Dialect Dictionary is by far his greatest achievement, and is still regarded as one of the finest dictionaries of its type.

 The 50 words listed here are all genuine entries taken from Wright’s English Dialect Dictionaryas well as a number of other equally fantastic local British glossaries, including John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), Francis Grose’sGlossary of Provincial and Local Words Used in England (1787), and John Ray’s Collection of South and East-Country Words (1691). Ranging from the bizarre to the useful, they all would make a brilliant addition to anyone’s vocabulary.



1. APTYCOCK: A quick-witted or intelligent young man. (SW England)
2. BANG-A-BONK: It might not look like it, but this is a verb meaning “to sit lazily on a riverbank.” (Gloucestershire)
3. BAUCHLE: A name for an old worn out shoe, and in particular one that no longer has a heel—although it was also used figuratively to refer to a pointless or useless person. (Ireland)
4. CLIMB-TACK: A cat that likes to walk along high shelves or picture rails is a climb-tack. (Yorkshire)



5. CLOMPH: To walk in shoes which are too large for your feet. (Central England)
6. CRAMBO-CLINK: Also known as crambo-jink, this is a word for poor quality poetry—or, figuratively, a long-winded and ultimately pointless conversation. (Scots)
7. CRINKIE-WINKIE: A groundless misgiving, or a poor reason for not doing something. (Scots)
8. CRUM-A-GRACKLE: Any awkward or difficult situation. (SW England)
9. CRUMPSY: Short-tempered and irritable. Probably a local variation of “grumpy.” (Central England)
10. CUDDLE-ME-BUFF: Why call it beer when you can call it cuddle-me-buff? (Yorkshire)



11. CULF: The loose feathers that come out of a mattress or cushion—and which “adhere to the clothes of any one who has lain upon it,” according to Wright. (Cornwall)
12. CURECKITYCOO: To coo like a dove—or, figuratively, to flirt and canoodle with someone. (Scots)
13. DAUNCY: If someone looks noticeably unwell, then they’re dauncy. Originally an Irish and northern English word, this eventually spread into colloquial American English in the 19th century. (Ireland)
14. DOUP-SCUD: Defined by Wright as “a heavy fall on the buttocks.” (NE Scots)
15. EEDLE-DODDLE: A person who shows no initiative in a crisis. Also used as an adjective to mean “negligent,” or “muddle-headed.” (Scots)



16. FAUCHLE: Fumbling things and making mistakes at work because you’re so tired? That’sfauchling. (Scots)
17. FLENCH: When the weather looks like it’s going to improve but it never does, then it’sflenched. (Scots)
18. FLOBY-MOBLY: The perfect word for describing the feeling of not being unwell, but still not quite feeling your best. A Scots equivalent was atweesh-an-atween. (Central England)
19. HANSPER: Pain and stiffness felt in the legs after a long walk. (Scots)
20. INISITIJITTY: A worthless, ridiculous looking person. (Central England)
21. JEDDARTY-JIDDARTY: Also spelled jiggerdy-jaggardy. Either way it means entwined or tangled. (NW England)
22. LENNOCHMORE: A larger-than-average baby. Comes from the Gaelic leanabh mor, meaning “big child.” (Scots)



23. LIMPSEY: Limp and flaccid, often used in reference to someone just before they faint. Originally from the easternmost counties of England, but borrowed into the United States in the 1800s—Walt Whitman and Harriet Beecher Stowe both used it in their writing. (East England)
24. MUNDLE: As a verb, mundle means to do something clumsily, or to be hampered or interrupted while trying to work. As a noun, a mundle is a cake slice or a wooden spatula—to lick the mundle but burn your tongue means to do something enjoyable, regardless of the consequences. (Central England)
25. NAWPY: A new pen. (Lincolnshire)
26. NIPPERKIN: A small gulp or draught of a drink, said to be roughly equal to one-eighth of a pint. (SW England)
27. OMPERLODGE: To disagree with or contradict someone. (Bedfordshire)
28. OUTSPECKLE: A laughing stock. (Scots)
29. PADDY-NODDY: A long and tedious story. (Lincolnshire)
30. PARWHOBBLE: To monopolize a conversation. (SW England)
31. PEG-PUFF: Defined as “a young woman with the manners of an old one.” (Northern England)
32. POLRUMPTIOUS: Raucous. Rude. Disruptive. Polrumptious. (Kent)




33. QUAALTAGH: The first person you see after you leave your house. Comes from an old Celtic New Year tradition in which the first person you see or speak to on the morning of January 1, the quaaltagh, was interpreted as a sign of what was to come in the year ahead. (Isle of Man)
34. RAZZLE: To cook something so that the outside of it burns, but the inside of it stays raw. You can also razzle yourself by warming yourself by a fire. (Yorkshire/East England)
35. SHACKBAGGERLY: An adjective describing anything left “in a loose, disorderly manner.” (Lincolnshire)
36. SHIVVINESS: The uncomfortable feeling of wearing new underwear. Shiv is an old word for thick, coarse wool or linen. (Yorkshire)
37. SILLERLESS: Literally “silverless”—or, in other words, completely broke. (Scots)
38. SLITHERUM: A dawdling, slow-moving person. (East England)
39. SLIVING: A thin slice of bread or meat, or a splinter of wood. (Yorkshire)
40. SLOCHET: To walk with your shoes nearly coming off your feet. Or to walk with your shoelaces untied. Or to walk slowly because your shoes are too big. (SW England)




41. SPINKIE-DEN: A woodland clearing full of flowers. (Scots)
42. TEWLY-STOMACHED: On its own, tewly means weak or sickly, or overly sensitive or delicate. Someone who is tewly-stomached has a weak stomach, or a poor constitution. (East England)
43. THALTHAN: Also spelled tholthan, a thalthan is a part-derelict building. (Isle of Man)
44. TITTY-TOIT: To spruce or tidy up. (Yorkshire)
45. UNCHANCY: Sometimes used to mean mischievous or unlucky, but also used to describe something potentially dangerous, or, according to Wright, “not safe to meddle with.” (Northern England)




46. VARGLE: Means either to work in a messy or untidy way, or to perform an unpleasant task. (Scots)
47. VARTIWELL: The little metal loop that the latch of a gate hooks into? That’s the vartiwell. According to the OED, it probably takes its name from an old French word for the bottom hinge of a gate, vervelle. (Eastern England)
48. WEATHER-MOUTH: A bright, sunny patch of sky on the horizon flanked by two dense banks of cloud is the weather-mouth. (Scots)



49. YAWMAGORP: A yawm is a yawn, and a gorp is a mouth. So a yawmagorp is a lounger or idler, or someone who seems constantly to be yawning and stretching wearily. (Yorkshire)
50. ZWODDER: The last entry in the English Dialect Dictionary describes “a drowsy, stupid state of body or mind.” It’s probably related to another word, swadder, used to mean “to grow weary with drinking.” (SW England)




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If there are no mistakes, then why am I such a screwup?




There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.
Buddha
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.
Benjamin Franklin

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
Bruce Lee




There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.
John Wooden
Making mistakes is the privilege of the active. . . Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.
Ingvar Kamprad





OK THEN! I've been wanting to write about all this for some time now, and it seems even more relevant in light of some recent events.

I am constantly coming across quotes about how desirable it is to make mistakes. We should make lots and lots of them, or else it proves we aren't doing anything. These quotes can come from business wizards like Steve Jobs, or spiritual bigwigs like Buddha, or meatball-eating furniture magnates like Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad (whom I always thought was an actor in one of those . . . movies . . .  you know the ones I mean).

The reality is somewhat different.

I think people say these things to try to alleviate the excruciating embarrassment and even humiliation that can arise from a single mistake. They're trying to make themselves feel better, not just you, and not just for past or present-day mistakes but as a sort of immunization against the humiliation of mistakes as yet unmade.






People are fired because of a single mistake, and their careers and self-esteem sometimes never recover. People lose their spouses because of a mistake (an affair? It happens, believe it or not), changing not just the course of their lives, but the lives of children and grandchildren and all their friends, who may not know on which side their loyalties should fall. (It's always one way or another, folks.)

One mistake, even one clumsy social error, can lodge itself in people's memory like one of those sticky-burr things. If you are kind and gracious 99% of the time, and fuck up 1% of the time, guess what people will remember?






I won't mention any names here, because I can't, but I once worked with an agent who ran into some problems approaching a publisher. The managing editor said, "I hate Margaret Gunning!" When asked why, he said, "Because she panned one of our authors." Something like ten years earlier, I had written a "negative" review of one of their books (I had certainly not trashed the book but felt it didn't cohere, which matched the opinion of the majority of other reviewers).

Was it a "mistake"? I was just doing my job, which is NOT to write synopses or dishwater generic non-reviews providing no critical analysis whatsoever. But even if it wasn't a mistake, it seemed to have created a rancor which would live forever. To that particular publisher, no matter what else I did to redeem myself,  my name would always be mud.

So imagine what would have happened if I HAD made a mistake, even a little one!




I've misfired on emails before, sent them the wrong way.  Doesn't everyone do this? I thought so, until I did it myself. Again, it was a publisher, and it was a mistake, and no one said "it's OK to make a mistake, it's the way we learn" or anything like that. Instead I got an email back saying, "Do you realize what you've just done?" You could hear their gasp of horror.  According to them at least, I had done so much damage with a single click that it turned out to be irreparable. Those people will never forget. And there was nothing vindictive in my email, nothing abusive, just information they should not have received.

I goofed. I clicked. I was dead.

Is it just me? If it's just me, I might as well commit suicide right here and now. If I am to believe all these wonderful quotes and the people who insist you should make as many mistakes as you possibly can in the course of a day (and maybe they mean "mistakes" like borrowing someone's pen and forgetting to give it back), then perhaps it's true. Perhaps I'm the only one who suffers massive repercussions from a mistake, hostility, rancour, and the feeling that what I've done is totally and permanently unforgiveable.





So OK. Let's take a look at these quotes that everyone finds so comforting:  Kubler-Ross for a start.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Kubler-Ross became world-famous for her "stages of grief" theory, which automatically found near-universal acceptance with therapists and clergy and every other type of counselor until someone decided, many decades later, to do some research on the subject. They discovered that there are no stages of grief, and that everyone processes grief differently. The original premise was "stages of dying", so Kubler-Ross was not entirely responsible for this misinformation. Her theory applied to people who were terminally ill and trying to come to terms with approaching death.

I don't think she ever intended these stages to be lodged in neat compartments, to be worked through sequentially over a set period of time, but that's what happened. Therapists began to require patients to "go through the stages", and if they didn't, they were pushed to do so. Come on, it's time for the anger stage now! Why aren't you angry? And how about some bargaining? You can't go on to acceptance until you do.




So what was the mistake here? The biggie was universally embracing an untried idea just because it sounded good. Her theory was appealing because those neat stages helped to regulate and contain something that most people find overwhelming, a force of nature that seldom shows any mercy.




I'd like to believe - OK, I wouldn't like to believe, because it's too out of touch with reality - that "all events are blessings given to us to learn from". I know New Age people who believe this, but I can't. I can't because I have known people who have lost infants to disease and children to horrific accidents and had to try to pick up the pieces. I can't because I watch the news every day and see with what horrifying regularity people are casually slaughtered by crazed gunmen who one day decide they'd like to spill a little blood.

These are the extremes, but there are plenty of them. I can't believe "all events are blessings" when I watch a documentary about Auschwitz or Dachau. (Calling the Third Reich a "mistake" is the understatement of all time, but with neo-Nazism thriving and even considered "cool" by some young people, did we really learn from it?)  I am still trying to figure out how an intelligent person can embrace this obvious fallacy. If your son commits suicide, is it a blessing? If you lose all your money and become homeless? I won't go on.






I can't compare events in my own life with tragedies of this magnitude. But I have experienced the alarming ways in which technology makes it even more costly to make a mistake.

I recently experienced one of those examples of the hellfire the internet can put you through. Because of something I wrote, I wasn't just roasted: I was mocked, excoriated, ridiculed, called nasty names, and made to look thoroughly stupid on someone's blog.

Obviously I had made a mistake. It was a bad one, I saw it quickly, deleted it and did what I could to make amends for it. I'd posted something that should never have been posted. Since I could not turn back the hands of time and un-write it, I could only do what I could do, and keep it brief, because over-apologizing is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

But I don't think it did one iota of good, and at best I was probably seen as covering my ass in a  gesture of self-preservation. I realize now that this was a mistake that might just live forever. "Delete" doesn't do anything to erase people's memory.




It doesn't matter if I did 99 things right. That hundredth thing may spell the end of my perceived integrity and worth as a writer, and even as a human being. And now that we are in the age of blogging and internet and social media, one mistake can explode massively in a matter of seconds. It can go viral, reaching hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people in the blink of an eye.




Blessings given for us to learn from? By the time we get around to learning from them, we may be ruined. Human brains always retain the negative, we seem to have evolved that way, while positive and neutral events just sort of wash away with the tide. Combine that with the supernova-level, instantaneous communication that exists today, and you could have a recipe for disaster.

I approach Facebook and other such systems with leeriness now. If I try to "friend" someone and it turns out they are the friend of someone whose book I panned in 1998, might they diss me on Facebook, their blog or elsewhere for being an opportunist, rude or just plain stupid? Do I "friend" more than one publisher, or will that be a conflict of interest? If I ONLY friend one publisher, what sort of idiot am I who can't do business with social media, which is in large part what it is set up to do?

But if you admit that, oh boy. Embarrasment! Everyone looks away. Everybody knows Facebook is just a friendly chat over the back fence, and anyone who even thinks it might be a form of making business contacts is either gauche or completely mercenary.  An elephant has suddenly appeared in the room and deposited 50 pounds of shit, and nobody knows where to look.




Maybe I was just behind the barn door when the rules were passed out. But it seems to me we'd all better watch our step. Making mistakes is a luxury which I think is the province of those alpha personalities who end up founding Ikea and changing therapeutic practice forever. The rest of us poor schlubs had better beware.


P. S.  The Alex Colville painting Horse and Train remains one of my all-time favorites, speaking with no words about forces which are about to collide with catastrophic impact. It strikes me as strange that artists get to make these kinds of statements to near-universal acclaim, praised for their profound and powerful reflection of reality, but when writers do it they're being "negative" and going against the tide of a happy-face philosophy that - as far as I am concerned - collides with reality.


 
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look





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