Monday, February 8, 2016

Gung Hay Fat Choy!


























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Sunday, February 7, 2016

Excuse my dust: or, why choose to be incinerated






In school, I "took" French.

Or, as my kids used to say when they were little, I "tookened" it.

This was so that I could have a wobbling, imperfect, and practically useless grasp of the other official language of my country. From about Grade 5, they began to hammer it into me.

Almost none of it stuck.

At this point, I have a most unfluent nongrasp of what I call "cereal box French". For my hordes of American fans, the ones who hang on to my every word (and four of whom quit last week, all at once, all because I wrote about climate change), this is the French that adorns each and every bit of merchandise produced in this great but strangely schizmed country. Including cereal.

So I decided it might be fun for me to translate this little French thingie I found on Facebook!


WHY CHOOSE TO BE INCINERATED

Why demand to terminate in an incinerator?

At departure, we are created of a tinsel of love.

The first year, we are the flame of our parents.

We chauffeur our ends up to our adolescence.

Then the period where we don't light up anything.

And in the twenties, one pets the fire.

In the suite, one is bushed up to 65 years.

At 75 years, one is burning.

At 80 years, one is amassed in a foyer.

Piss at 90 years, one is burnt.

Too bad! Why demand to be incinerated? One is already cooked in all ways.


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George Gershwin - Blah Blah Blah





This is THE hardest Gershwin song to perform, because nobody understands what it's about.

I traced the roots of it down to an obscure 1931 movie called Delicious. It was George and Ira Gershwin's first attempt to write songs for the silver screen, although their initial wild burst of enthusiasm soon collapsed like a ruined souffle.

It almost immediately became apparent to them that their talents really weren't required at all. Hollywood demanded the kind of generic love song that any idiot could tunelessly hum, not giving a good goddamn WHAT the words were because what difference does it make anyway? No one remembers them. And the simpler and more mind-numbing the tune, the easier it is to whistle as you leave the theatre.

"I should live so long," George lamented near the end of his life, "that Sam Goldwyn should say to me, why can't you write hits like Irving Berlin?"

The brothers got a bit of their own back with this pointy little gem, but nobody seems to get it in performance. There are a number of gorgeously operatic versions on YouTube which are just as ridiculous as ALL gorgeously operatic versions of smart-ass, snappy satire.  In other words, it hits the floor with a double-clunk.

They are oversung, overacted, and just WRONG. Meanwhile, there is a whole crop of performances that make me wince: the singer rolls his/her eyes and looks panicky with each "blah blah blah", as if to say: gosh, I've forgotten the words! 

 As was always the case, George and Ira knew exactly what they were doing. And if the audience wasn't in on the joke, if they just saw it as a silly little thing with no lyrics, so much the better.

Or perhaps they thought: George and Ira Gershwin. I wonder what all the fuss is about? These gentlemen can't write songs at all.

This fellow, Andrey Stolyarov, stands a little awkwardly and might sell the thing a bit more adeptly, but vocally he's perfect, with a slight nasal quality that puts all those "blahs" over with a distinctly Gershwinesque flair. Here is his YouTube channel, which I intend to dip into with pleasure:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_xMc3vp-GiJOSmPIbdi4AA

Somebody got it, George. You only had to wait about 85 years.


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The Ghomeshi trial: this handful of slime



























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

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

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

That's why.

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

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




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

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




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

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

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




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

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




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

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



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

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



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

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





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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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




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


Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


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Ryan IS the Taekwondo Kid!




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


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Friday, February 5, 2016

Harold, you can come in my window any time.


  
 



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Love walked in



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Thursday, February 4, 2016

Bentley's World



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Wednesday, February 3, 2016



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Tuesday, February 2, 2016

An offer you can't refuse




Well, yes.

And no.

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

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

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




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

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

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




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

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

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

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




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




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

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




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

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

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


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