Funny video of Bob Dylan playing with words

I pounded on a farmhouse

Lookin’ for a place to stay

I was mighty mighty tired

I had come a long long way

I said, “Hey, hey, in there 

Is there anybody home?” 

I was standin’ on the steps 

Feelin’ most alone 

When out comes a farmer 

He must have thought that I was nuts 

He immediately looked at me 

And stuck a gun into my guts 

I fell down

To my bended knees

Saying, “I dig farmers

Don’t shoot me, please!”

He cocked his rifle

And began to shout

“Are you that travelin’ salesman

That I have heard about”

I said, “No! No! No!

I’m a doctor and it’s true

I’m a clean-cut kid

And I been to college too”

Then in comes his daughter

Whose name was Rita

She looked like she stepped out of

La Dolce Vita

I immediately tried to cool it

With her dad

And told him what a

Nice, pretty farm he had

He said, “What do doctors

Know about farms, pray tell?”

I said, “I was born

At the bottom of a wishing well”

Well, by the dirt beneath my nails

I guess he knew I wouldn’t lie

He said "I guess you’re tired”

He said it kinda sly

I said, “Yes, ten thousand miles

Today I drove”

He said, “I got a bed for you

Underneath the stove

Just one condition

You can go to sleep right now

That you don’t touch my daughter

And in the morning, milk the cow”

I was sleepin’ like a rat

When I heard something jerkin’

There stood Rita

Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins 

She said, “Would you like to take a shower? 

I’ll show you up to the door” 

I said, “Oh, no! no! 

I’ve been through this movie before” 

I knew I had to split 

But I didn’t know how 

When she said 

“Would you like to take that shower now?” 

Well, I couldn’t leave

Unless the old man chased me out

’Cause I’d already promised

That I’d milk his cows

I had to say something

To strike him very weird

So I yelled

“I like Fidel Castro and his beard”

Rita looked offended

But she got out of the way

As he came charging down the stairs

Sayin’, “What’s that I heard you say?”

I said, “I like Fidel Castro

I think you heard me right”

And ducked as he swung

At me with all his might 

Rita mumbled something 

’Bout her mother on the hill 

As his fist hit the icebox 

He said he’s going to kill 

If I don’t get out the door 

In two seconds flat 

“You unpatriotic 

Rotten doctor Commie rat” 

Well, he threw a Reader’s Digest

At my head and I did run

I did a somersault

As I seen him get his gun 

And crashed through the window 

At a hundred miles an hour 

And landed fully blast 

In his garden flowers 

Rita said, “Come back!” 

As he started to load 

The sun was comin’ up 

And I was runnin’ down the road 

Well, I don’t figure I’ll be back

There for a spell

Even though Rita moved away

And got a job in a motel

He still waits for me

Constant on the sly

He wants to turn me in

To the F.B.I.

Me, I romp and stomp

Thankful as I romp

Without freedom of speech

I might be in the swamp

Bob Dylan

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author page!

This video is guaranteed to calm your soul!

None so blind: the Galloway affair

May as well enter the fray, as most other writers have in this country.  But how to deal with the maelstrom of "issues" that have jumped out of the closet? Why is this strange jack-in-the-box suddenly exploding out of the container, if everything is going so well (as the more privileged writers insist)? Why are you so upset all of a sudden, why are "all you survivor people out there" in such a snit? God's in his heaven, all's right with CanLit: isn't it? Hey, MY paycheque is OK, how about yours? Gone to any signings lately? And let's not get into all the other issues. Better yet: let's.  It's my video and I'll kvetch if I want to. But after all these years, I believe I have a right.

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Bentley vs. Cybercat!

White shadow: cats from a mystic world

There are certain cats - for some reason, almost all of them are white - which have a special genetic quirk called heterochromia iridum: meaning, they have two different eye colours, one blue and one green or yellow. But there are a few here who have something even more rare: sectoral heterochromia, which means. . . really pretty eyes! It means they have two colours in EACH eye. In some cases it's just a spot, and a little hard to see, but sometimes the division is quite dramatic.

What is it about white cats? I've also heard that many of them are deaf. But they more than make up for that difficulty with eyes so beautiful, it transports them into the realm of the mystical.

One of these photos looks photoshopped. I doubt if there is such a thing as a heterochromia rainbowia. But you never know, so I included it.

Farewell Fidel

Che, Fidel, Camilo.

Hamster on a piano, Act II

Sequel to Hamster on a Piano.

@-would

I want a deep-fried turkey!

Happy "Yanks"-giving

Try Canada!

Legs on springs: adorable baby goats

Inhale. . . exhale!

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author page!

Canadian Idol: a portrait of Margaret Atwood

No, really! And it's only because I found this cool picture of her. I didn't really need to do much to it. I have no artistic talent whatsoever, but I have never let that stop me. (If I could only do things I was good at, I'd be six feet under by now.) The animation is the usual semi-shitty PicMix, but it's still better than the wretched Blingee which would always lose your finished piece.

I want to be done with the CanLit kerfuffle, but when I saw this picture I had to do something with it. You can put whatever interpretation you want on it. Project on it all you want. What I settled on was quite simple: Vancouver rain; cat's eye. The rest, she did herself.

No one swings more weight than this gal in the literary world - the tight, stifling, incestuous Canadian literary world. She is one of the few who "broke out" (? Funny expression - when I reviewed books, every new title would be called the writer's "breakout novel"). I never broke out, which means - what? That I am still imprisoned? "Out" seems to mean bursting out of captivity, or revealing one's true sexual orientation.

Oh, but it's just words! I've been hearing that a lot lately. Break out. Thrown into. Incarcerated, with its echo of something cancerous. Witch hunt, McCarthy trials, etc. Perhaps, just perhaps there are echoes of that, but I have not yet heard of anyone being burned at the stake.

It's provocative language, and we all use it. Thing is, this is a whole bunch of pissed-off writers with the capability of ripping into each other in a nanosecond (and not in some private paper letter, but IN PUBLIC, sometimes in front of a huge audience. Whatever else it is, it is most definitely a performance.) I wonder if humankind can be trusted with such a capacity.

All right, so I did two portraits. I wasn't even going to do ONE. It's pure serendipity which animations will work, and I like how the gaudy Gothic rose flashes on and off and sort of wraps around her, while the rose on fire on the other side is fanned by a bat. What does it say: don't mess with me? It was never my intention to stick my tongue out. I just wanted to see where this would take me.

Sweet America

Well I think it's time I'm leaving Oklahoma

There's 49 more ways to live my life

America, I'm sure that I don't know you

And I do believe you're worth another try

Sweet America, eulogize America

Then fall down on your knees and cry

Sweet America, sing about America

Then fall down on your knees and cry

Some of you say you're fourth generation

Some of you say you're part Cherokee

America, to me I see you naked

While others see just what they want to see

Sweet America, eulogize America

Then fall down on your knees and cry

Sweet America, sing about America

Then fall down on your knees and cry

I love California

But I'm watching it die

I'm watching it die

Sweet America, eulogize America

Then fall down on your knees and cry

Sweet America, sing about America

Then fall down on your knees and cry

Sweet America, eulogize America

Sing about America, sweet America

Sweet America, eulogize America

Sing about America, sweet America

This isn't the version I wanted to post, but the one I heard in my head simply wasn't available. It was by Barry Greenfield, but a much more luxe version with the first few notes of the American national anthem played on chimes. I woke up this morning with these lines in my head:

I love California

But I'm watching it die

I'm watching it die

Then I realized that, like Save the Country by Laura Nyro/The Fifth Dimension, it was a perfect anthem for these times. These melancholy, frightening times. This was written by an Englishman, I think - haven't had time to research it, there are so many miseries to attend to! So much trauma. This morning I asked myself, why do I feel this weird elation, almost euphoria sometimes? Then it came to me: I'm in crisis mode. I do great in a crisis, lousy all the rest of the time. Adrenaline mobilizes, "fight" supercedes "flight" - but only for a while. Those resources are only to be pulled out and used when they absolutely must.

I've never loved America, but I AM watching it die. And there does not seem to be one damn thing I can do about it. 

DON'T check your views!

After re-reading some of my recent posts, I am sorry for, or at least a little embarrassed about, writing the same piece three or four times. I am referring, of course, to the recent CanLit debacle, starring Steven Galloway in the Randle P. McMurphy role.  I had thought of deleting one or two, but each one emphasizes a certain aspect. .  . so. . . ah. . . I was surprised to see it, anyway. Each time I wrote, it seemed like the first time. This may be a sign of advancing age and a brain that sometimes seems as arthritic as my ghastly old knuckles. 

Once I've written and posted things, I try to forget about them. I know that is not the best attitude, but it is my personal antidote to the feverish "OMG-I'm-not-getting-enough-views/likes/hits/kisses/love" that seems to be a requirement of bloggitude and the internet-verse in general. Lately I have been trying assiduously NOT (t-t-t-t-t-tttt) to check my blog views, simply because a few weeks ago they shot up by several hundred per post for no reason I could ascertain. Certainly I wasn't writing any better. Most of the views were for the kind of silly video I like to post, both to lighten things up and because I really do think they're cool. But some were for actual pieces of writing that I did. I was not used to this and almost panicked. Wait a minute! Is somebody trying to read my stuff?

I've never had what could be called a "readership", though at one point I was as anxious as anyone else who writes and tries to publish.  I'm of the opinion now that I should write whatever the hell suits, pleases and is personally therapeutic for ME and just put it out there. One person may read it, or none. My new YouTube enterprise is even more shocking: the only reason I get one view is that there is no "zero" setting, but was it ever any different? ("Those whose names were never called/When choosing sides for basketball" - Janis Ian, "At Seventeen").

At any rate, I don't want to write about CanLit any more, don't want to see people tearing into each other in public from the anonymous safety of their phone. Used to be, if you hated someone or were furious with them, you found a piece of paper, stuck it in your typewriter (or found a pen), spilled out your enraged thoughts in the letter, then folded it, addressed it, found a stamp (if you could find one - hell, I could never find a PEN!), then went outside (outside! THAT place), and started walking (!) to the mail box.

While it was true you couldn't take it back once it went thunk into the mailbox, that stroll might give you time to think better of it. Writers and people in general were usually advised to leave such a letter overnight, sleep on it. 

Whoever the hell sleeps on ANYTHING any more? And we all weigh 300 pounds and are more neurotic about power and popularity than ever.

Try to love one another

Reduce the stigma? How about the stupidity?

Like most writers in these parts, I’ve already written about the current Big Issue in CanLit, and don’t want to recap it. This is a side issue – maybe – but it’s an important one that, to my knowledge, no one else has touched on.

It's unpalatable to me to read about someone being “arrested”, “incarcerated”, subjected to a “Gestapo-style arrest”, and “thrown in a mental hospital” (all phrases I’ve read on Facebook), when to my knowledge this person was taken to a psychiatric facility for his own protection. It happened because according to two of his colleagues (now being horribly demonized by some), he was in danger of committing suicide. My understanding is that a person in this position is not “incarcerated” but under 24-hour observation only and can sign themselves out at that point.

I wasn’t there, of course, but the people making these provocative and alarming statements were not there either. Yet they report on it as if they were, in some cases even “naming names” about people who WERE there and blaming/shaming them for the incident, as if they caused it or at least allowed it to happen. 

The narrative has degradation/humiliation as its main theme. Being called "crazy" is still the worst, most career-destroying epithet of all - especially when, of course, you actually aren't but have been tarred-and-feathered with the same awful brush. I get the sense of people pointing at some dungeon of the soul and claiming that he certainly did not belong with THOSE people, who were being medicated to the gills and given ECT without their consent.

This is not 1962. He is not Jack Nicholson being shocked and lobotomized. And this is a stupid, stupid way to try to create sympathy for someone who, in my opinion, does not deserve it.

The implication of “incarceration” is alarming, because it implies punishment via imprisonment in the “madhouse” (a la Solzhenitsyn, a martyring rhetoric). It also displays the shame, horror and stigma STILL associated with psychiatric illness or even the suggestion of it, and portrays a scenario of a sane man being “committed” and dragged away in irons, kicking and screaming about his rights.

Did that happen? I don’t know. Though it does not seem likely, it’s being reported that way. At very least, it is being suggested by provocative terminology that smacks of "well, she told me" - "then HE told ME -" whispering around the campfire circle, the story amplified and distorted with each telling. As with campfire stories, ancient terrors usually pushed to the back of the mind begin to emerge, and the story takes on a life of its own.

Who better to invent stories (especially about the horrors of the madhouse, a favorite topic in fiction) than a whole bunch of pissed-off writers? What better medium than the Twitterverse, that strange otherworld of verbal hit-and-run? Stories and counterstories, letters and counterletters swarm around, and there is a virtually audible sense of heartbreak. 

Atwood's deliberate use of the phrase "witch hunt" (please forgive the Salem ads, they were left over from my last post) is a direct stab at the credibility of the complainants. Surely these claims were groundless, or at least blown far out of proportion: really, "not that bad", only what any attractive young woman should expect to experience with a charismatic, hip prof (and maybe even an advantage, come to think of it - why aren't these women more grateful?).

It's almost universal for abusers in positions of power to reverse the dynamics when under attack, suddenly flip-flopping into victim mode to gain professional and public sympathy: in which case, the dragged-off-in-chains scenario would only help. (If he were actually mentally ill, of course, it would be a whole 'nother story: he wouldn't know what he was talking about). It's obvious that the "victim" has tons of powerful supporters, a virtual Who's Who of CanLit - though some are apparently beginning to think better of it. Meanwhile, people post and tweet "at" each other. I have even seen Facebook posts in all-caps, displaying far more fulminating fury than that notorious “other side” who can’t seem to shut up about powerlessness. 

It's a kind of civil war among people usually exalted for their intelligence, insight and sensitivity.

Can’t we do better than that? This is 2016. I don’t know what happened there, YOU don’t know what happened there, but let’s dispense with this awful “thrown in the loony bin” rhetoric. The fact that people still think that way makes me wonder if there is any hope for the much-vaunted movement to “reach out for help” and “reduce the stigma”. 

Let’s reduce (eliminate!) the stupidity first.

POST-BLOG. Obviously I still need to write about this. It's the only way I can get my mind around the meltdown that is happening in my field (though, of course, I am forever on the fringes, and now quite relieved to be that way). So please forgive me if I seem repetitive. Illusions are biting the dust all over the place, elitism is rearing its ugly head, friendships are breaking apart, and new writers are wondering how they will ever have a future in this precarious field, or (given the bizarre, sick dynamics of it) if they even want to. And what are the alternatives? 

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author page!

Butt Out - The Life and Death of Cigarette Advertising on Television

One of the better YouTube docs about cigarettes and the way Big Tobacco fought the truth (and won, for a very long time: "A treat instead of a treatment!").

By the way, this was produced by A & E. I used to watch Biography every day, then it trickled down to three times a week, then one, then it was on another network - then it disappeared, to be replaced by "reality" dreck. A & E no longer exists as a producer of quality documentaries.

"Do you inhale?": Vintage cigarette advertisements

Here is another of my gif /slidehows of old ads. I've wanted to do one of cigarette ads for a while now, but once I started researching, I was inundated. There are just thousands of these things out there. I found whole sites devoted to them. They had all been neatly archived according to date and type. The fascination with these things continues, so full of jaunty lies.

Cigarettes were so normalized, so much a part of culture. They were associated with sophistication (long gloves and cigarette holder), rugged masculinity ("Come to where the flavour is!"), femininity (a bride throwing a bouquet after stubbing out her Lucky), and certain psychological benefits - lifting you up or calming you down, depending on which direction you needed to be levelled. And of course, there was smoking as social ritual, a harmless and fun form of recreation.

These ads exhort you to "be happy - go Lucky!" They depict adorable babies posing questions to their Moms and Dads about their smoking habits. Doctors exhort their patients to smoke Camels, because that's what THEY smoke. More than one ad asks "do you inhale?" Women are bursting with athletic health and glee, never getting fat because they smoke rather than eat.

Did all this shit work? I mean, did people actually buy them because of this propaganda?

Must have. Took a long, long time for the public to catch on. Mad Men was actually about the tobacco boondoggle and its eventual defeat, though the show then had to go on to other things (like foreign cars that wouldn't start, thus defeating carbon monoxide suicide attempts).

I saw a documentary about all this - hair-raising, it was, because by the end of it, it turned out Big Tobacco was doing better than ever, shipping their lethal substance overseas to the Third World where smoking makes the horrors of life just bearable. This is where you see pictures of three-year-old kids smoking.

Let's look at a few of these things in detail.

Babies abound in these things, and it's puzzling. Of course they're cute, but are the ads somehow, obliquely, telling women that it's OK to smoke while they're pregnant? They DID tell women that. Also that it was OK to smoke around them. Everyone did anyway. But I find this association especially creepy because it makes no logical sense.

One of the more chilling Lucky Strike slogans was "Smoke a Lucky to feel your LEVEL best!" This usually depicted a widely grinning young woman - in this case getting married and throwing her bouquet.  But it's the fine print that makes my stomach drop: "Luckies' fine tobacco picks you up when you're low. . . calms you down when you're tense - puts you on the Lucky level." Level seems to be the operative term here, the desirable thing. Cigarettes are being used as a drug to regulate mood. Did it work? Look at the explosion of antidepressant use today. Maybe we should bring back the Leveller?

No. No! Not one. NOT ONE SINGLE CASE OF THROAT IRRITATION due to smoking CAMELS! Now I know why we're asked not to use all-caps on the internet because it makes you seem to be shouting. In this case, an official-looking man in a white coat, presumably a doctor, is displaying case studies of people who have gone and smoked their brains out for months, and STILL do not display ONE SINGLE CASE of throat irritation. "Start your own 30-Day Camel MILDNESS Test Today!" Mildness is a term you see in a lot of these ads, along with flavour. To me, sucking smoke into my lungs via my mouth and tongue just wouldn't taste very good. But I may be wrong. I can see why it might put you off food, which in these ads is considered a good thing.

Let me just transcribe the text below the photo: "A really mild, flavorful smoke that enters your mouth pleasantly cool and filtered. Embassy's extra length of fine, mellow tobaccos provides extra enjoyment plus an extra margin of protection. Try Embassy! Inhale to your heart's content!"

This is completely chilling in light of what we now know about the value of filters in protecting people from cancer. They did absolutely doodlysquat, but for decades the public was told over and over again that they filtered out "tar" and other unwanted things. This was an obvious attempt to assuage public anxiety about all those silly things the Surgeon General had been telling them, that their lungs would rot and they would end their days coughing up blood in a cancer ward.

This is another aspect of the cigarette ad: gorgeousness. Some of these are just so beautiful to look at! How could anything so sophisticated and artful be bad for you? But soft! What lie through yonder advertisement breaks? Could it be - more reassuring text?

DO YOU INHALE? Luckies "makes no bones" about this vital question. "Keep that under your hat," said the cigarette trade when first we raised the question - "Do you inhale?"

But silence is golden only when it's unwise to speak. Let others explain their striking avoidance of this subject. Lucky Strike makes its position crystal clear. . . for certainly, inhaling is most important to every smoker.

For everybody inhales - whether they realize it or not. . . every smoker breathes in some part of the smoke he or she draws out of a cigarette.

Do you inhale? Lucky Strike "makes no bones" about this vital question, because certain impurities concealed in even the finest, mildest tobacco are removed by Luckies' famous purifying process. Luckies created that process. Only Luckies have it!  "It's toasted"

"Toasted" seems to imply that the tobacco has somehow been purified of carcinogens (a word that might not even have been coined back then). Someone in the tobacco industry waved a magic wand over it, rendering it harmless. Surely the good folks at Lucky Strike, the LSMFT people ("Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco") would know best, and would never do anything to harm the public. But those ads seem to bespeak certain nameless jitters among the general population, not to mention the tobacco industry itself.

Was it the fact that 90% of heavy smokers were pulling a Humphrey Bogart or an Edward R. Murrow in their final days and gasping their last in the cancer ward? Did no one put the pieces together? But if they tried to, Lucky reassured them: pish-tosh! WE don't mind discussing the matter even though everyone else is being needlessly coy about it. WE are honest about the fact that smokers inhale. But our product is so magically-produced, with shamans sitting out in the tobacco fields moaning incantations over it day and night, that those delicate throat membranes surely won't start to ulcerate, bleed, fester, bubble, blister and turn black.

A FRANK DISCUSSION AT LAST

on a subject that has long been "taboo"

"Let sleeping dogs lie!" So said the cigarette trade when first we raised the subject of inhaling. But dodging an important issue is not Lucky Strike's policy!

Do you inhale? That question is vitally important. . . for every smoker inhales - knowingly or unknowingly. Every smoker breathes in some part of the smoke he or she draws out of a cigarette! And the delicate membranes of your throat demand that your smoke be pure, clean - free of certain impurities!

No wonder Lucky Strike dares to raise this vital question! For Luckies bring you the protection you want - because Luckies' famous purifying process removes certain impurities concealed in every tobacco leaf. Luckies created that process. Only Luckies have it! 

So, whether you inhale knowingly or unknowingly, safeguard those delicate membranes!

"It's toasted"

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Bambi and Thumper are REAL!

Steven Galloway: outside of Canada, nobody cares

BLOGGER'S LAMENT.  I am absolutely exhausted. Just wiped out. I've been - somehow - don't know how - didn't want to do it, didn't want to do it - caught up in the Steven Galloway "affaire".

What's that, you ask? Who he? Outside of Canada, nobody cares. Steven Galloway is a former professor of Creative Writing at UBC (University of British Columbia, for my hordes of overseas fans). Professor Galloway had a habit of sexually assaulting female students, quite a number of them in fact, and some of them were beginning to actually complain about it. After an internal investigation, UBC dismissed him. 

But that is not the end, readers! The muck really begins here. In the past few days, 80 of Canada's creme de la creme/elite/"just plain old BEST" authors all lined up to sign an "open letter" to UBC protesting his dismissal. These Big 80, described in the press as "a Who's Who" of Canadian Literature, didn't think it was too gol-dern fair for The Professor to be held accountable for his actions - not to the point of actually losing his job! They insisted that a proper investigation be held to drag the situation out endlessly and allow Galloway to hire some crack lawyer who would blow down the (likely poor and marginalized) injured parties with one breath.

But the more people looked at this petition and the signatures under it, the more they smelled days'-old fish.

UBC is known as a sort of literary mill, a vast machine churning out new writers, who then, eventually, become Establishment: the new elite of CanLit. This is how the system renews itself: think of an immense, seething termite queen whose sole purpose is spewing out more termites.

If one unit of this family (and I use the term in a Sicilian sense) suffers in any way, the others must, according to their contract, rush to his/her aid. It is the termite way, and it is immutable.

The whole thing made me ill. To my mind, it was an extreme example of the wagons going in a circle, not to mention what Orwell might have called "wethink" (or, perhaps, "we-think"). A number of these CanLit muckety-mucks actually took their names OFF the "open" letter (which, to my mind, was about as closed a thing as I have ever seen), once they realized what it was they had actually signed.

Not to jest, because this has left me feeling like road kill. For the glittering Literatti will surely mass together when one of their own is under attack - while casually throwing a number of vulnerable, relatively powerless sexual assault survivors under the bus.

Or so it seems to me. 

Margaret Atwood, the Queen Bee or perhaps the Termite Queen of CanLit, wrote a letter of her own, which I won't reproduce here, but it's haughty. She tries to backtrack on her original statement, which compared Steven Galloway's dismissal to being burned at the stake in Salem. (Her references to a "witch hunt" strongly implied the students' claims were driven by hysterical delusion).

She has since made an effort to cover her literary ass, but it's a little late for that. Charmingly, she does remind us all that Galloway was "thrown in a mental hospital", which is apparently the worst fate which can befall a human being. The indignity of it - the horror, the shame - a Gulag Archipelago, UBC-style! It was all designed to cue the "He's Really The Victim" music.

If I jest about all this, it's so I won't cry. The whole thing exhausts me. Like Dorothy Parker, I only jest to keep from howling. (And please don't think I am comparing myself to her - I stopped drinking 26 years ago).