"The Snake Pit," Plus Bonus Memories From the Psychiatric Hospital

At the end of the 1948 movie "The Snake Pit," our newly-sane heroine tells her heroic doctor that she knows she has recovered her sanity because she's no longer in love with him. The same woman in the original 1946 novel has a similar moment of epiphany...but for entirely opposite reasons.

I've just finished reading the novel after years of enjoying the film, and the glaring differences between the book and the film are almost as fascinating as the themes that both products share. They are both about the institutional experiences of a woman following a nervous breakdown, and they both give insights into what is effective and what is counterproductive when treating mental illness, but when you compare the book and the film you learn an awful lot about Hollywood -- both then and now -- and about what happens when men who haven't been there adapt a book by a woman who has, and about the fundamental differences between life, art, and entertainment. Mary Jane Ward's fictionalized account of her own experiences is the life and the art...the movie is the entertainment.

I've loved the movie since I first saw it as a teen, and there's no doubting it had an impact on American policy regarding state-run institutions (though how much impact is up for debate). It's heart-wrenching and quite beautiful. Olivia de Havilland -- as protagonist Virginia Cunningham -- is an absolutely jittering wreck and she more than earned her Academy nomination. Helen Craig is also excellent as the vicious Nurse Davis, and Betsy Blair is also pretty spectacular as the silent and dangerously bottled-up Hester. You might also recognize Marie Blake as "Patient Awaiting Staff," twenty years before she became Grandmama in The Addams Family (if there's anybody you'd expect to see in an asylum, it's her!)

But one thing always bothered me about the movie: Sigmund Freud is practically a co-star. His picture hangs on the wall of saintly Dr. Kik's office, overseeing endless psychotherapy sessions and actually taking center stage during the final, Perry Mason-ish explanation that Virginia's problems started when she wasn't given enough affection as an infant. You see, interspersed with gritty scenes of institutional life are long sequences when Dr. Kik probes Virginia's childhood. She had a nervous breakdown because -- in a textbook case of Freudian psychology -- she transferred her love from a cold mother to a warm father, then hated him when he sided with her mother, then felt guilty because he died after she wished he was dead, then felt even guiltier because she accidentally caused the death of a father-surrogate fiancee.

This always seemed like so much bullsh*t to me, even more so after many years studying Psychology (including All Things Freud) in University. So I was wary about reading the book...if the Freudian angle was so significant in the movie, imagine how much Elektra complex backstory I'd have to wade through in the book?

Well, I finally read the book, and the answer is: none. Oh, there IS a Dr. Kik in the book, and he IS a Freudian therapist...but--

(are you ready for this?)

--in the book, Virginia only gets well when she is TRANSFERRED TO A DIFFERENT DOCTOR AND HAS LEARNED TO STOP EXPECTING DR. KIK TO ACTUALLY BOTHER TO HELP HER.

If you've seen the movie, think about that for a second. Mary Jane Ward -- who WAS Virginia Cunningham, for about 18 terrible months of her life -- credits Dr. Kik's psychotherapeutic approach with actually HOLDING HER BACK. By insisting that Virginia's nervous breakdown was the result of guilt about the death of her fiancee after a long illness and her subsequent marriage to her fiancee's friend, Dr. Kik did nothing but chase his tail while neglecting what Virginia REALLY needed...

...which was a healthy environment, an understanding ear, a realistic assessment of her capabilities, and some frigging books to read. Instead, she was kept underfed and cold in a succession of wards where the staff were too busy to notice that she wasn't as capable as they thought she was, then she was punished horrifically for falling short of their (and Dr. Kik's) expectations. She spent the entire time wearing dirty clothes, sitting around women with unspecified skin conditions ("Not syphilis!" says one doctor), usually on the floor, with nothing to occupy her day except confusion and utter boredom. In fact, she suspects that many of the women in Ward 33 (where you're sent if you've been at the institution for more than a year) talked to themselves and created imaginary friends because they had nothing else to occupy their minds.

I mentioned horrific punishment. Some of Virginia's earliest memories of the institution -- all of which are muddled and foggy -- are of a succession of shock treatments. Later she is subjected to the dreaded "tubs," continuously flowing baths that were meant to sedate patients, but involved them basically being wrapped in canvas and submerged up to their necks in tepid water.

The worst torture in the book, however, and one that was whispered among the patients as the ultimate punishment for disobedience: "packing." This was a hydrotherapeutic technique called a "wet sheet pack," where the patient was wrapped in cold sheets, around which were wrapped blankets, then held down on a rubber mat by series of tight sheets over the body.

I suppose there's a fine line between shocking a person to attention and teaching them to avoid terrible punishments, but there's no indication in the book that these treatments helped Virginia (in fact, whereas in the movie the shock treatments are administered as a last resort and are presented as helping Dr. Kik "make contact" with Virginia, in the book it seems that Virginia was getting them constantly since her arrival, and she suggests they may be blamed for much of her disorientation and memory loss).

So if the point of the movie was that psychotherapy and gentleness helps patients and that institutions need to be run with more consideration, what is the point of the book? Well, it's pretty much the same point, except for two things: psychotherapy is barely mentioned, and the entire situation is much less black and white than it is in the movie. There's no explanation for the onset of Virginia's illness -- thyroid trouble and difficulty adapting a life in New York City are the primary suspects -- and even less a resolution for why she actually got better.

In the movie, her recovery is solely the result of Dr. Kik's miraculous unraveling and exposure of Virginia's background. There is absolutely nothing like that in the book: maybe it just took eighteen months for her to recover, or maybe the treatments (and the endless doses of paraldehyde) DID help her focus. A contributing factor seems to have been diversionary  and social occupational therapy that she could actually perform, as opposed to types of work that she was incapable of doing properly due to her well-hidden confusion (or -- in the case of the dreaded floor polisher -- her lack of upper-body strength).

What IS apparent in the book are the signs that she's getting better: she begins to understand jokes and she actually starts to find them funny. She starts engaging in the only sort of therapy she's allowed: "thinking therapy." And -- as is touched on in the movie -- she starts to become selfish, as result of her renewed acquaintance with time:

The softness is leaving. The sympathy. Yes, and the generosity...I no longer distribute cigarettes the way I used to. it is a queer way to judge your sanity...I am able now to take heed of the day to come. I have three cigarettes and if I look ahead I'll see that I cannot order more until the day after tomorrow. Therefore I shall not share my supply but I shall hoard it so that each day I can be sure of having one smoke. That, dear lady, is sanity.

Incidentally, sympathy and generosity are presented as contributing factors to the decline of Miss Sommerville from nurse to patient. The nurses in the book are simply too busy to be able to really help anybody (let alone everybody), and poor Miss Sommerville finds herself walking around the ward keeping track of everybody's bowel movements. As an indication of the differences between a gritty novel and a slick Hollywood film, consider Miss Sommerville in the film: she takes people's temperatures. The film also neglects other significant themes in the book: Virginia's amusing anecdotes about her "True Trotskyite" friends, her less amusing anecdotes about the bathroom arrangements in the institution, and the plight of black patients dealing with white nurses.

You should read the book if you find the subject even remotely interesting. It is superbly written and surprisingly funny -- all hilarious scenes from the movie have been taken word-for-word from the book, including the repartee about "The Hopeless Diamond" -- and it is REALLY gripping from beginning to end. Unlike the movie character, the Virginia in the book is not a cringing little kitten looking for daddy to save her (or husband or therapist, which amount to the same thing). The book's Virginia (that is, Mary Jane Ward) is terrified on the inside but visibly strong and capable (which is ultimately part of her problem).

As a hilariously ironic indictment of the movie's deviations, I give you the following dialog from the book:

Well, the hell with my subconscious. What I'm interested in is getting the old conscious to working again. You know, maybe my subconscious did cook up something like Dr. Kik said, but if it did I'm sure it was for a novel. I always did have a secret, anyhow I hoped it was secret, ambition to write tripe.

Bonus Memories From the Psychiatric Hospital

For several months during the early '90s I volunteered in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. My job was to help manage recreational activities for the patients on Sunday mornings.

Since I was the new volunteer I was required to take direction from the more keen and seasoned organizers. We'd breeze into the recreation room at 10am, and one of the announcers would say "Hello everybody! Here are some old magazines and some Bristol board. Let's make collages about our favourite sports!"

I couldn't believe it. The patients were uniformly either depressed elderly people or depressed university students. They were adults, and we were telling them to make COLLAGES.

And they WOULD. Next week the announcer would say "Let's make decorative coat hangers!" and these grandparents and adolescents would shamble up and start working with the yarn. I stood there among the cardboard crafts and thought: these people need dignity, and we are stealing it from them. We are making them worse.

So I spoke up. "Here's a deck of cards. Does anybody want to play cards, or chess?" and people would stare at me in amazement. One University student -- a major in NUCLEAR PHYSICS -- came up to me and whispered "THANK YOU SO MUCH" and we played chess together. When I asked him why people came to these things even though they hated them so much, he said something that pretty much convinced me that I was in the wrong major: "If we don't show up, they think it's an indication that we're antisocial and getting more depressed."

You get that? These people were being trained to do something totally abnormal -- to take part in a degrading activity that they hated -- under the belief that doing so would make them BETTER. Their sanity was judged in inverse proportion to how insane they behaved. I was immediately reminded of the rug scene in "The Snake Pit," a huge rug in the middle of the dayroom that the patients were forced to huddle AROUND instead of standing ON because the nurses were afraid of getting it dirty.

Here's what I read today in "The Snake Pit," a book I wish I'd read a long time ago:

That afternoon she was invited to a popcorn party. [Nurse] Vance thought that was just too super for words. When the Popcorn Ladies were summoned, Virginia stumped over to the door to join the group. If you were going to get out of this prison it looked as if you'd have to do what they said, even to the extent of going to a damn popcorn party.

I guess some things never change...but they should. Anyway, I already hated the place because they kept the electroshock therapy bed in the entertainment room beside the ping pong table. When one of the organizers said "This week I've got a Jane Fonda workout tape...we're going to march around the room!" I quit.

Don't Be a Farty Bugger When You Get Old

I rarely throw down a book in disgust, but after twenty pages of "You Had To Be There" by Robert Collins I feel like tossing it in the trash, and THEN streaking through an old folk's home.

Here's some advice for Mr. Collins, and for you as well, reader: If you're going to complain about the behaviour and beliefs of a younger generation, stop and ask yourself if your parents said exactly the same thing about YOU. If so, shut your farty old bugger mouth and get reacquainted with the world. If not, shut your trap anyway, because nobody likes a smug blog-reader who has nestled into the generation gap like it were a comfy couch or the very vagina of God/Family/Country herself.

First, the younger generation is not fundamentally different from yours, with the possible exception that they generally don't believe the same things you believed, probably because you wouldn't shut up about those things during their formative years.

Second, your generation was not The Best Generation Ever. Disregarding all the selective memory and willful blindness and massive generalizations you make about other people based on your own narrow peer group, don't forget that YOU BROUGHT THE YOUNGER GENERATION INTO BEING. It was YOUR social structures, YOUR upbringing, YOUR revolutions (or lack thereof) that brought us to where we are today. Before you point fingers at "the kids," ask yourself who their ARCHITECTS were. You, goofy!

And finally, your anecdotes about the superiority of your idyllic development are worth nothing whatsoever from a sociological standpoint. They are skewed and selective and personal and do not say anything about the development of the other people around you. Likewise, the snapshot behaviour of some teenager who cut you off in traffic does not a generational trend make...how do you think your grandparents felt when some kid almost ran them off the road during a drag race, Big Bopper tunes all a-blastin'?

I get this increasingly from a baby boomer family member who is CONVINCED that the world is going to hell. I'll grant that the population density is higher than it was (partly because those boomers just couldn't stop making babies), but when this person bemoans urban crime or the latest child-sex scandal, I can only point out the increasing millions of dollars that the Catholic church needs to spend to redress the long-ago crimes of pedophile priests. I can point to books from EVERY generation which describe that decade's Unprecedented Urban Crime. I can point to endless editorials from every year in every age about how Those Damn Kids Have No Respect.

When Robert Collins -- under the guise of teaching the next generation how their grandparents live -- tells me that his own generation was so chaste and patriotic, I say PHOEY. Kids his age were having sex, getting venereal diseases, and going to unlicensed practitioners to abort the children they'd conceived in the stable/carriage/roadster. A sizable proportion of Collins' fellow citizens wanted nothing to do with the second world war and did everything they could to stay out of it. Phoey again!

Collins is the archetypal crotchety senior citizen who wants to boost is own sense of nobility by denigrating others. The first twenty pages of the book are peppered with constant digs at the lazy baby boomers...those same boomers who now berate subsequent generations for their laziness.

Whenever somebody tries to start a conversation with me about "kids today" and the first words out of their mouth (or the first paragraphs in their book) have something to do with the immorality or incomprehensibility of contemporary popular music, I know immediately that there's no hope for them. They are crotchety old fogies already. They have already forgotten KISS, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, and every jazz orchestra that got their start in a Harlem nightclub.

Nobody's generation can claim superiority or wash its hands of today's problems, which is why "You Had To Be There" is going in the garbage can, and then I'm going to run through an Adult Education Center without any pants on, as soon as it's a bit warmer.

Hot on the Feline Heels and Hot to Trot and Anxiety

If I hadn't gone out to find a new cat companion, I would probably be in an agony of depression right now. Instead I'm in an agony of worry, which is really no better or worse I suppose.

My mother and I went to the Humane Society after being unable to find a suitable cat at Petcetera. The Humane Society was full of people checking out the cats and climbing into their cages to sit with them, so I was already feeling a sense of urgency.

When I walked past the cage of Muffet, she reached out and gently pawed at the glass, so I asked to sit with her and evaluate her personality.

Muffet was very outgoing, wanting to be rubbed and making lots of vocalizations. At the time she seemed like the right cat, so after ten minutes or so with her I asked for the adoption forms.

But as I was filling them out I began to realize that Muffet's rolling-and-meowing routine wasn't stopping and -- frankly -- was getting a bit annoying. When the Humane Society volunteer returned, I said I was having second thoughts, and she said "Oh, I see what's happening...Muffet's going into heat."

She reassured me that getting her spayed would fix the problem, and also that veterinarians will spay cats in heat. Relieved, I filled out the forms and handed them in...

...but something was in the back of my mind. As I stood waiting for everything to be entered into the computer and processed, I began to wonder if I should adopt a cat who I had only interacted with while she was in heat...what if her personality radically changed afterwards, or what if she continued to be this manic? Something in me was struggling, I wanted to say "Wait, maybe not," but adopters were wandering around the halls pouncing on cats and I was afraid that if I waited I would lose a potentially great companion.

Then, after I paid, the receptionist heard that Muffet was in heat. "Oh, you're adopting a cat in heat? Bless you!" she said, laughing.

Oh shit, I thought. What am I getting myself in for?

The woman at the pet store had equally ominous "cat in heat" stories to tell, and everybody online talks about what a disruptive and annoying experience it is for cat owners. They also say that vets may refuse to spay a cat in heat, so I may be looking at two weeks of this "ominously-described" behaviour.

I say "ominously-described," because Muffet hasn't really done much yet. She's still getting used to my house so -- in between coaxed exploration -- she's hiding in the basement crawl space. No "caterwauling" yet, but when I pet her she begins to rub herself all over me in the "cat in heat" way, and I automatically get anxious...

...and is an anxious pet owner a good pet owner? Am I already souring our relationship? Is Muffet going to do things before I can spay her that will make me dislike her?

I say this as a person who is quite obsessed with my routine, my sleep, and my stretches of "quiet time." A cat in heat sounds, to me, the way that kryptonite probably makes Superman feel.

So I'm WORRIED. Part of this is because this is a new situation and I don't respond to new situations well. It's also that I kick myself for not giving it all more consideration before I took Muffet home (I feel irresponsible), and the knowledge that if somebody had said "Muffet will yowl loudly and constantly for hours on end at all times of day and night," I would not have consented. I didn't know what was involved.

I tell myself that if I can't get her spayed until she's out of heat, and if her heat-behaviour drives me over the edge, I can surrender her back to the Humane Society and accept the lost money (and the additional outlay of the surrender fee), and also accept that this is not fair to her, it's annoying for the Humane Society, and it will probably negatively-impact my chances of adopting another cat.

The thing is, when I'm on the brink of uncertainty I absolutely torture myself with worry and anxiety. As an adolescent I would work myself into full-blown, incapacitating panic attacks, and while I no longer (it seems) react in such an extreme way as an adult I still do put myself into a bad state. This coupled with a crushing grief about Zsa Zsa and the additional anxiety of a Saturday-night drag show and a (next-) Wednesday-night spoken word stint.

I'm writing all this out because I recognize that my anxiety is based on cognitive-reasoning flaws, so when I express everything (as I have here) and see that it isn't half as catastrophic* as I thought it was, I can calm down to a point where I can (hopefully) sleep eventually. You blog readers -- and "you blog" itself -- are at this moment substitutes for a friendly, logical, reassuring voice.

What, ultimately, do I need to recognize in order to calm myself down? The same things that I ALWAYS need to recognize but I so often manage to forget:

1. I can deal with the situation.
2. The fact that I got into the situation in the first place does not make me a bad or worthless person.
3. If I CAN'T deal with the situation, there is a solution.
   

In my head I believe all three of those things. Now if I could only convince my adrenal glands...

* Pun!

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

In January I read an extremely positive review of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction in a 1930s New Yorker magazine. Unable to find any of her short stories at the time, I instead read "The Heat of the Day," which I found tedious in its obsessive examination of people's thought processes. In short, I was impressed by her approach and her zeal but I found the book extremely annoying.

Now, after a long slog, I'm finishing off "The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen," which apparently contains all of the short fiction she ever wrote...and let me tell you, she wrote a lot. Many of these stories were ones that the New Yorker reviewer raved about. How has it been?

Complete collections of a prolific writer's short fiction should come with a big warning, which unfortunately I know I'd disregard anyway: "Do not read all these stories in a row. They were not meant to be read this way. They previously appeared in diverse periodicals and smaller collections. You have been warned."

So I'm warning you: just as the complete short fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges can drive you insane, so can the complete short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Not because it's BAD -- it's brilliant, in fact -- but just because there's too much of it.

And like the complete works of ANY writer I found myself noticing the trends in her work, most particularly:

• The trauma of moving to different houses, particularly among the upper classes. Her characters suffer the sale of the ancestral homes and the purchasing of newer, awkward, unpleasant homes which turn out of have sweaty plaster.
• The trauma of living off another person's charity, especially when the other person isn't charitable and -- in reality -- just keeps people around to traumatize them.
• The strange boredom of off-season luxury resorts.
• The thought processes of alienated, troublesome children.
• Aunts. Everybody's got an aunt who is the most significant secondary character.

These are things that you wouldn't notice if you read her stories occasionally, and they're entirely superficial to the plots themselves, but when you're reading them all in a row it's like "Oh yes, a new house, a strange aunt, now let's get to the heart of it please."

And the hearts of these stories are devastating, especially the ones written during the '20s and '30s. Most of them are about the slow, mundane grind of everyday relationships and the hidden compulsions that modernists so loved to write about. Bowen has a particular ability for troubled children who are so lifelike that you almost want to turn away. The precocious Maria (in the story of the same name) the crying little boy with his ducks (in "Tears, Idle Tears") and the absolutely doomed Hermione (in "The Easter Egg Party") are permanently stuck with me.

Bowen's style isn't one that relies on an all-encompassing statement to make its point; instead, the drama builds and builds through successive examples, leaving you squirming with the terrible, truthful awkwardness of it all. Here's a description of Hermione, viewed through the eyes of a pair of aunts who are trying a last-ditch attempt to integrate her with other children.

She shook hands with a rigid arm, on which all the bracelets jumped. She looked straight at everyone, but from a moody height: what was evident was not just fear or shyness but a desperate, cut-off haughtiness. In her eyes existed a world of alien experience. The jolly, tallish girls with their chubbed hair, the straddling little boys with their bare knees, apt to frown at the grass between their sandshoes, rebounded from that imperious stare. Either she cared too much or she did not care a fig for them -- and in either case they did not know how to meet her.

And that's before things get bad. You see, it's both normal and abnormal, expected and unexpected: it's the odd part of people and everyday life that you try not to look closely at.

Elizabeth Bowen writes almost all of her stories about these situations.

Then there's the other, somewhat less satisfying trend, the one that the New Yorker reviewer had particularly liked: the ghost stories. These appear from out of nowhere in the collection and they disappear just as quickly and bafflingly. Why did Bowen write about ghosts as often as she did?

Well, most of the ghosts are catalysts for the emotional outpourings of her characters, and likewise the reader is uncertain as to whether they're REAL ghosts or not...except in two stories, one of which (Green Holly) is surprisingly gruesome.

Unfortunately Bowen had an occasional tendency to doddle, in which case her longer stories end up in the same vein as "The Heat of the Day," seeming directionless, obsessive, and far too inward-looking. Her writing was at its best at ten pages or less. I found every story that was longer than 15 pages to be virtually unreadable (and believe me, I have a high threshold for this sort of thing).

Rather than tell you to go out and read the whole book (which I don't recommend) or tell you NOT to read her work (which would be a disservice), I suggest you pick up her Collected Stories and only read the ones from the '20s and '30s, and only the shorter ones. If you have a personal interest in the London Blitz then you should read the War-Time stories as well (and at least give "Mysterious Kôr" a try, which harkens back to her best creepy character studies).

If any Elizabeth Bowen fans read this, please let me know which novels YOU would suggest. I have another one lying around someplace but I don't think I can handle it right at the moment.

Elizabeth Bowen, "The Heat of the Day"

I read a glowing review of an early Elizabeth Bowen short story collection in a 1930s New Yorker magazine, so I picked up one of her well-regarded novels: "The Heat of the Day." Written in 1948 and covering the London Blitz -- a period that fascinates me -- it should have been a satisfying read. Unfortunately it drove me crazy with tedium and frustration.

"The Heat of the Day" follows the complex interactions of a small group of characters in wartime London, none of who is unambiguously who they claim to be. Surrounded by the unique rules and sensations of a country at war, they both rely on each other and threaten each other, using ominous and largely-unspoken powers and secrets to make life difficult for everyone around them.

On the surface it has the plot of a thriller (an intelligence agent is blackmailing a woman because he knows her boyfriend is a traitor), but that's only the first layer and it's the least important. The second layer is the constant uncertainty of who is who, why they say what they say, and what sort of ominous secrets do they hold, not to mention the influences that war and secrets and uncertainty have on people's behaviour.

Unfortunately even THAT layer of plot is subordinate to the novel's real, central focus: the extremely complicated mental and emotional interplay between the characters whenever they gather in different combinations. I say that's "unfortunate" because the bulk of the novel is dense, head-to-head dialog that veers into psychology and philosophy for dozens of pages at a stretch. People come together, they debate, and they debate some more. They talk about their own thoughts and impressions in such an artificial way that it's like witnessing a therapy session for neurotic poet-philosophers:

"Anything one must say, one must say as soon as one can. One cannot time feeling--at least, as you know, I can't: I suppose that's where to women most men seem to blunder. No, you must face it: all along the line I'm not half so clever as you seem to have thought--or half-thought?"

And on and on and on.

People don't talk like that. It's not even artificial in a "deeper level of language" sort of way. It's not the kind of language that resonates, it's the sort of thing you'd read in the rough notes for a textbook. Everybody in "The Heat of the Day" both talks and thinks that way...and most of the novel is them talking and thinking, alone or in pairs, in a succession of increasingly dreary rooms.

But there's something else underneath it all which manages to hold it together: the mood. A sense of approaching danger and a deep, wicked, selfish wartime hopelessness. Most fascinating is Louie, a character so tangential to the plot that she need not even be there...but her petty, stupid uselessness is what informs the rest of the book and puts everything else in context. It all begins and ends with her, even though she has no actual influence ON anything.

That tells you something important about "The Heat of the Day," but I'm not sure exactly what. I found the book befuddling; though I'm impressed by Elizabeth Bowen's writing, and though I found the more tangible and restrained sections of the book to be beautiful and slightly terrifying, the book itself was an annoyance.

I've gotten my hands on a complete collection of her stories and I look forward to reading it: my impression of Bowen is that her obsessive and searching eye is much better suited to short stories.

Eena, Deina, Pitera, Pimp

I'm reading "Lost Country Life" by Dorothy Hartley, based around Thomas Tusser's famous 16th century farming calendar.

Being totally unsourced and written in a know-it-all tone, some of the book seems a tad dubious; you wonder if, being 87 herself when the book was written, she held more stock than she should have in her own intuition, memories, and the homey parables of her mysterious gardener.

But at the very least the book is full of beefy (if scattered) information about the smallest tasks of the medieval farmers. If this isn't really how it was, then it is how it SHOULD have been.

Many of her insights provoke interesting questions, even if you don't exactly believe her answers. For instance: how did people with no education manage to separate a specific number of animals -- say twenty -- from a herd? With "shepherd counts," apparently, regionally-specific "four-finger" counts that used words instead of numbers. "Eena, deena, dina, das; catiler, weena, winer, was," you'd say in the West Riding, or -- if you were in Rochdale -- "Eena, deina, pitera, pimp."

She also explains how all those beautiful British hedgerows were built, and the crazy methods for making rennet, and the various uses of both cows and oxen.

It's taken me a week to actually start enjoying this book (due to its informal and poorly-organized preface), but now I'm learning all sorts of things I've always wondered. I'll never USE these tips for plowing a strip of land or washing a sheep, but it's fascinating to learn how medieval mind explained the mysteries of land and animal, and how they slowly began to innovate.

"Homophobia"

Last week a Grade 12 student asked me to write a mini-essay about "homophobia," so she could read it to her class as part of a project. Here's what I came up with:

I'm wary about telling homophobia-related anecdotes because I don't want to become negative and sensationalistic; my days of sulky victimization are over! We all know that terrible things can happen, but over the years I've become more interested in solutions than retelling my rare moments of drag-related misery.

But even though I feel more at peace with the world than I used to, I don't think it's easy for other people to understand WHY I feel that way. And you can't tackle the roots of homophobia -- let alone discover the ways of combating it -- without looking at specific incidents and coming to some basic conclusions.

So I'll tell you two of my more interesting horror stories, and then I'll share the lessons that those situations taught me.

One way that homophobia manifests itself is a simple "group versus outsider" dynamic. There is something about humanity that feels most confident and secure when it's part of a group, and the simplest way to assert "groupness" is to exclude everybody else. This doesn't always come down to violence -- you can see it happen everywhere, in workplaces or book clubs or patriotic speeches -- but when it involves violence it becomes much more noticeable.

Usually I only have "outsider" dealings with three or four drunk men at a time, but in 2003 I actually faced a mob. It was during the midnight show of the Waterloo Busker Festival. I was wearing a flashy showgirl outfit and watching the buskers with some friends, and about fifteen people in the crowd started to toss pennies at us. When they realized that nobody was going to defend us they got increasingly bold, throwing the coins with full force and finally starting to chant: "Get the fag!" No kidding.

This happened at the edge of a huge crowd of able-bodied, reasonable, and intelligent people. It should never have reached the level that it did, but the reason that we had to run away from a handful of chanting, violent strangers in uptown Waterloo was because NOBODY IN THE CROWD HELPED US. They SAW us and they understood what was happening, but they all looked away, probably frightened.

Here's the first lesson I've learned about homophobia: it only happens if bystanders allow it to. I have been in many other situations where a small group of people have started to get violent with me, but it always stops when a single stranger steps up to defend me. This reverses the "us versus them" belief that is the root of this form of homophobia; when the aggressors suddenly realize that THEY are the outsiders and not ME, it's like popping a big ugly balloon. They retreat and go home and complain to each other and then they throw up.

But if the balloon doesn't pop in the face of public disapproval then something more complicated is at work. I'm talking about the men who hate homosexuality but are simultaneously attracted to me, even though they know I'm a man.

This happens in bars near the end of the night. I suppose that these people can deny their attraction to men in most situations, but they can't deny their attraction to a man in a dress, and this gives them a glimpse of themselves that they don't like at all.

Usually they try to take this anger and confusion out on me in an over-the-top, ironically sexual way, trying to "mock molest" me in front of their friends. This is meant to prove that they're "straight," but their obsessive and bizarre behaviour makes them look even gayer than they're pretending NOT to be.

One extreme incident incident sticks in my mind, though; it was a whole new level. I was sitting on a stool and minding my own business when a huge, hulking guy sat down next to me. He leaned close and said quietly and calmly into my ear: "Watching you looking so good and turning me on like that makes me want to pick up a hammer and kill you."

Then he got right up and left the bar. He was so sober and matter-of-fact that I totally believed what he'd said...and I realized the deep, burning, loathing and hatred that a person can feel for themselves, and how often that loathing can be directed at something or somebody else.

It's a common tactic to enrage homophobes by saying they are secretly homosexual themselves, but in some cases I know this is true, especially when their derision is sexualized. Their feelings are composed of some terrible combination of self-loathing, panic, public shame, and thwarted affection. Society and the sick people in it must work REALLY HARD to instill those sorts of feelings in a child...it doesn't "just happen." Fortunately I think it happens less and less, and that can only be a good thing for everybody.

One final point I'd like to make is that there is a difference between "homophobia" and "confusion." The vast majority of encounters that I have are with people who simply don't "get it," not because they HATE me, but because they've never MET somebody like me...they want to know "why," and they ask blunt questions, and they giggle a bit. If I were to label their attitude as "homophobia" then I would approach them differently, but as it is I try to be friendly and honest. I never JUSTIFY what I do, but I'll still EXPLAIN it.

Granted, the way people confront crossdressers is different from the way they confront lesbians or gay men who aren't in drag, but by learning to tell the difference between confusion and homophobia, between curiosity and cruelty, I have made friends and allies instead of enemies. Maybe I can do this now because I'm comfortable enough about myself that I can make other people comfortable too, as long as their intentions are even remotely good.

That's why I'm wary of sharing sensationalistic anecdotes: because even though it's important to know how bad things can be out there, it is equally important for me to remember that the vast majority of people really DON'T want to hurt me. Most of them are simply INTERESTED in me. That says something good about people, and I try to always keep it in mind when I'm out in the world.

"I Am Not Dumb Now"

I'm reading a biography of Helen Keller in the January 25, 1930 issue of The New Yorker, and it lead me to this contemporary newsreel film.



Stunning, baffling, and beautiful.

My Shy Date With Modern Dance

On Thursday night I watched the rehearsal for "60 Dances in 60 Minutes," which will be performed at The Registry Theatre on November 4th. I'd hoped to learn what contemporary dance is all about and -- more importantly -- what makes it entertaining, enlightening, or (God forbid) insufferable to the modern layperson audience-member.

Can I explain the secrets of dance after a mere four hours of exposure? I only saw one single company performing one single piece and I didn't even get to see the end. There are many different approaches to dance, and every audience member is an individual, so I can't just say "This is what it's all about" (as much as that would save me some heavy pondering and how-do-I-express-this anxiety).

Seeing the rehearsal -- and enjoying some whispered chats with Jacob Zimmer, the dramaturge -- hasn't left me with many answers and it hasn't turned me into an instant fan. I learned a few more things about my personal hangups and how they relate to my entertainment choices...at the very least it was a good private therapy session.

But I'm not here to tell you about my childhood trauma; that's what the REST of this blog is about. I'm assuming instead that some of my insights may be interesting to you, whether you loathe modern dance or you think it's the absolute cat's meow.

WARMING UP

"60 Dances in 60 Minutes" was first performed in February by the five principle dancers of the Dancemakers company. For the show in Kitchener they'd chosen to add five local dancers to the performance, and they thought it would be interesting to have me -- the clueless, curious, neurotic-but-eloquent spectator -- sit in during one of their rehearsals.

I was nervous. As is always the case with events where audience-appreciation is not tied to long-standing rules of etiquette and judgment, my first concern was how much reverence I was expected to have for their work. How serious must I be? Dost I dare to make jokes about thee art, especially being the only person in the audience and surrounded by its performers and creators, all of whom are extremely fit? I can't speak for other shows, but I can say this for sure: if you don't laugh a bit during "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" then you probably have a really crappy sense of humour.

But the question remains: what should the audience get out of this particular performance? The more abstract a piece of entertainment is -- the more distant it is from convention, the fewer obvious cues transmitted by the performers, the more flexible its parameters -- the greater the potential for hostility, boredom, confusion, or feelings of boorish inadequacy. Nobody likes to feel stupid, especially not those of us who consider ourselves open-minded and experienced enough to be able to "get it."

Most forms of contemporary dance do not, in my experience, present themselves in traditional or unambiguous ways. If the audience doesn't "get" the performance, is that a failure of us or the dance company? Is that even a failure at all?

THE EXPERIMENT

The title "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" gives you an idea of what this performance is about, but here's a more explicit precis: the dancers, singly or in groups, will perform various tasks during a certain time period. How will ten dancers (and the audience) perceive the performance of these tasks in relation to the passage of time?

We have all benefited from (and been victimized by) time's subjectivity. Two hours spent at a good party can feel like ten fleeting minutes, while a ten-minute drive home with a full bladder simply never ends.

"60 Dances in 60 Minutes" is -- in its most obvious interpretation -- about the subjectivity of time. Even if you miss the somewhat hasty and informal explanation at the beginning of the performance, you will eventually notice that the dancers are attempting to synchronize their tasks -- like counting silently in their heads -- but they never finish together despite all their highly-polished dancerly-discipline.

Why can't they sync with each other? Because the passage of time, in the absence of coordinated cues like the a visible clock, is a subjective and ever-changing thing. None of us have quartz crystals in our heads. We rely on metabolism and breathing, stride-length and thought-passage to inform us of how quickly the rest of the world is moving in relation to us. When all the dancers close their eyes simultaneously and start counting silently, and then each of them raises a hand when they have reached the agreed-upon number, the dancer who ate a cheeseburger may finish faster than the one with a painful blister on her heel. This is a bizarre and entertaining way of expressing what we deal with every day: there is no way for people to synchronize with each other without external time cues.

To look at it in one way, "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" is a series of experiments to demonstrate how individual people perceive time. Sometimes the time intervals are short and sometimes they're excruciatingly long, and due to this occasional excruciating nature, the AUDIENCE is ALSO confronted with their individual time-perceptions: three minutes staring at a motionless line of dancers evokes all sorts of feelings, but one of them is how long three minutes can be when not a heck of a lot is going on.

THE AUDIENCE AND THE NARRATIVE.

Back to the rehearsal and my impressions of it. Early on I noticed that the director and the performers were using evocative words to describe the sixty different sections of the performance.

One section was called "witnessing," for example, and another was "the how-to's." There were movements called "abbreviations" and "acronyms," and there were also "koala" and "suicide."

These words were a convenient shorthand for the dancers, of course, but I was fascinated by the fact that the audience would never hear those words (unless they looked at the rundown which was provided at the end of the show). When I saw one dancer carrying another, belly-to-belly, in a tight and motionless embrace, my perception of the act changed as soon as I found out -- thanks to my privileged position as silent rehearsal voyeur -- that they referred to this action as "koala." If they'd called it "frog" or "Kali" then I probably would have viewed it differently.

Why do I bring this up? Because our perception of PLOT is just as subjective as our perception of TIME. "Hamlet" would give a very different impression to a 17th century barmaid, a bored highschool student, and a queer theorist respectively. No plot can contain one single, universal impression for everybody. You can say this about books or movies or any other type of public art you can think of.

Contemporary dance rarely telegraphs its narrative as clearly as a Hemmingway novel, and even if it DID there'd be the same issues of interpretation. When we see one woman suspending and holding another woman closely, what does that mean to us? Is it love? Is it trust? Is it fear or hope or disability? Hemmingway would tell us which it was -- and he'd probably wrestle both dancers to the ground as well -- but would we agree with his assertion? And would our perception of the act be richened -- or cheapened -- if we found it was called "koala?"

Contemporary dance, to me, seems largely ambiguous. The thematic clues given to the audience in "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" are not presented like they would be in an Agatha Christie novel...

...but the point of "60 Dances" is not to discover whodunnit before the pompous detective does. I suspect that the dance company would agree with me that they do not expect everybody in the audience to absorb the information provided in exactly the same way; in fact, the company might HATE that possibility. I suspect that they -- and perhaps most artists who work in relatively non-traditional ways -- want the audience members to make up their own minds.

But here's the thing: I'm not part of the dance company, I'm an audience member, so how many clues to the narrative should I be given? How much of it should be explained, and how clearly? Should there be identifiable characters in the performance with individual motivations, or are they all just "dancers," lab rats in a time experiment...a time experiment which I may not even understand is going on? While watching the rehearsal I found myself fixating on the words "koala" and "the how-to's" and "witnessing" because I CRAVED a plot. I clung to one reoccurring figure -- a girl in a parka with a subtly funny walk -- because she provided me with a sense of character that I find satisfying and fulfilling.

"What is the narrative of a symphony?" Jacob asked when we talked about this, and he's correct. And keep in mind that I was also watching the rehearsal of a performance that was yet to be completed, and watching it in the artificial environment of a closed theatre, without an audience, under bright lights, with a full bladder.

But I think this comes to the root of my general wariness about contemporary dance. I am not familiar with the concepts and history of the artform so I can't construct even a tenuous narrative like "I don't understand the literal soup cans but at least I understand pop art." I am also not privy to the thoughts of the dramaturge or the director or the performers, because they choose to remain silent or (more likely) because I hate reading the tiny print on theatre brochures.

Without knowing the concepts that the company is trying to express, I can't compare them with my own impressions. I don't know whether they've succeeded in getting their ideas across. And if my impression is the opposite of what they intended to convey, has the performance been a failure? Is there such a thing as failure in contemporary dance? Or in an abstract painting? In a symphony?

PS: I am generally confused by the symphonies as well. Sorry.

AESTHETICS VERSUS THEME

Back to the rehearsal. "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" is not just an experiment in subjective time; if it were then it would be best inflicted on a bunch of undergrads in a controlled manner (hopefully with electric shocks), and not performed on a stage.

No, the AESTHETICS of this performance are important as well. It's as though the success of the aforementioned experiment depends partly on whether the experimenter is wearing footwear which compliments the style of the electroencephalogram.

During the rehearsal there were constant negotiations between the artistic director, the associate director, and all ten dancers about the smallest details of the piece. This process was collaborative and everybody offered suggestions, and while some were practical -- dealing with safety, for instance -- and some related to theme, most of them were based on simple aesthetic considerations.

The discussions about the look and feel of the piece were the only extended and difficult ones I witnessed; should the dancers who perform the "knee burn" be hesitating before they slide, or should they dive right in? When two dancers do an impromptu translation from French to English, should they do it cautiously or should they just shout over each other? And how noisy should each of them be when they all count out loud?

A lot of discussion went into what one particular dancer should do during a three-minute segment. When somebody suggested that she should run to the back wall and press herself against it, associate director Bonnie Kim said "That's great. I love the wall." And everybody agreed.

"Loving the wall" has nothing to do with the theme of "60 Dances in 60 Minutes." There is no thematic reason why that dancer, at that time, should do that particular action. It's not a plot thing, it's not a character thing. It just seemed good.

In another one of our whispered conferences, Jacob agreeed that aesthetic decisions are pervasive and important to him, and they provide another aspect of what the audience may take away from the show: does it feel right? Is it well-paced? Is there enough variety?

Some modern works are composed entirely within rigid initial constraints, which is why they may come across as dry, pedantic, and mechanical. There must always be the consideration of how much one should deviate from (or add to) the central conceit in order to appeal to form and feeling, those most subjective of audience impressions. Does it look or sound good? Does it resonate nicely? Does it move so far from the theme that the point is lost and the audience is distracted?

Sometimes yes, if you're as literal-minded as I am. When the dancers jog or slide or tickle each other, a somewhat grumpy part of my brain wants to know "why are they sliding?" because I can't relate those things to my everyday life. When a stranger walks up to me on the street and spends three minutes explaining to me how to bake a Shepherd's pie, I think he's insane and he probably wants to put me IN the pie, which is not pleasing at all. It's kooky.

Jacob whispers to me about furnishing a room: there are basic rules regarding size and clearance, but there are also aesthetic considerations. It's not generally desirable to eliminate either consideration: you end up with a fully rule-based composition (like a boiler room) or one that looks great but your friends avoid, because the couch is too far away from the coffee table, and you can't see the TV properly, and when you touch the wall it collapses.

If modern dance doesn't appeal to the eye, has it failed? Conversely, if it ONLY appeals to the eye, is it nothing more than an awkward Hokey-Pokey that you're not allowed to join?

THE PERFORMANCE

Why all this speculation? Why didn't I ask Jacob or director Michael Trent what THEY felt the audience would perceive?

I'm not lazy, honest! I wanted to develop my own ideas about the piece, and I also wanted to glean -- non-verbally, instinctively -- what they subconsciously hoped for and expected. What would be a success for them? What would failure be? Did success or failure even matter?

The primary impression I got was that they enjoy what they do, they are intensely interested in their audience, and they are confident that people WILL appreciate and understand it. During the four hours I was there I didn't actually see them debate their methods of communicating their ideas, but those discussions probably happened long ago, during the initial planning stages, before the February shows ever happened.

And me? My original plan was to go to several rehearsals and try to see the process from different angles, but I don't think I would have learned anything more than I already did, and besides I'd need a lot more exposure in order to make this really be about THEM or YOU instead of ME.

All I REALLY know is that, despite all of my kvetching and analyzing and quizzing, I'm impressed with what they're doing and I can't wait to see the show. I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I won't know why, thank goodness. I think I just will.

But I'll have to take all other performances as they come, much as I would a book, or a film...or even a symphony.

JJ Sucks Me In

Hey, I'm older than I look (I hope!) Somehow I can't handle a full week of Open Ears concerts while still holding down my 9-5 job. So tonight I decided to stay home, play with my cat, get some work done, and actually sleep.

But first I went to YouTube to check out the latest videos I've subscribed to, and...well, you know how it is. You see a "related video" that sounds intriguing, and twenty minutes later you're sucked into a collection of horribly addictive clips.

JUDGE JUDY.

My grandmother watches court shows all day, every day. She told me this on Easter and I scoffed at her. I said she was rotting her brain. She agreed.

I just spent two hours watching clips from Judge Judy, because I'm just as susceptible to brain rot as anybody else. My only defense, your honour, is that I never INTENDED to watch them. At worst I am guilty of SECOND DEGREE consumption, so please go easy on me.

To try to get SOMETHING worthwhile out of this monumental waste of time, let me explain why Court TV is so addictive. It's because we spend all day feeling like we're the innocent ones and everybody else is guilty, but we're punished while the guilty people go free. We don't want to wallow in wishy-washy stuff like "points of view" and "selection bias" and "willful blindness of our own stupidity," we just want an omnipotent being to come down and say "You're right, they're wrong, you're better than they are, NEXT!"

Fictional television programs give us a bit of this thrill, but they throw in a bunch of other things and -- after all -- it's only fiction. Reality TV gets closer to home but we still sort of know it isn't real. Trashy talk shows fulfil our need to watch people who are stupider than us actually FIGHT, because sometimes we don't want JUSTICE, we just want some righteous inbred ass-kicking.

But Judge Judy...she is the authority figure we want to have on our side, the one who not only comes down and clearly draws the line between right and wrong, but also delivers the ass-kicking as a sort of frosty dessert. We see exaggerated cases where one person is clearly lying, or stupid, or evil, or all of the above, and then we see us on the other side -- the rightous one who is still fallible enough to get whupped by JJ now and then -- and then the holy fires of Judy come down and reward the right people and send the wrong people away to pay what they owe and make a final statement ("Don't trust JERKS, is all I have to say.")

There are a lot of other things going on as well. We respect Judge Judy's no-nonsense practicality and her ability to get straight to the point (in the editing room). We like to think that Judy would give us a break and approve of our behaviour. We also like the freakshow of people who are clearly stupider than we are...it makes us feel superior in our intelligence, amazed at their incompetence, and furious at their attempted duplicity. If they happen to WIN a case we can get angry that those stupid people were taken ADVANTAGE of, and we can mentally pat them on the head and say "Thanks for being honest, stupid person."

This is all an extension of what we do every day...but it's a HUGE extension. It's narcissistic and polarizing and a gross distortion of what human disagreements are really about. I mean, sure, there ARE times when people go to court for indefensible reasons and get their butts kicked, but usually it's a matter of subtlety, perception, and who-said-what...

...you know, all that stuff we hate thinking about every day because we know that WE are always RIGHT.

Judge Judy, you are fulfilling human needs that are, ultimately, anti-social and demented. But you're funny anyway.

Luis Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

Twenty guests arrive at a posh dinner party, from which the servants have mysteriously vacated. After eating, they retire to the music room, and they remain there long after they have outstayed their welcome. Instead of leaving, they lie down around the room and spend the night, and it doesn't take long for them to realize that they're trapped; they cannot leave the room.

What makes "The Exterminating Angel" so chilling is that the barrier PREVENTING them from leaving is not a physical one; it's an extremely human PSYCHOLOGICAL barrier composed of rationalization, convention, and lack of initiative. When somebody tries to enter or leave the music room, they do not bump up against some sort of invisible force field. They simply come up with reasons to NOT cross the barrier, or with reasons to prevent others from doing so, even though they realize on various levels that none of it makes any sense.

We've all seen variations of "The Lord of the Flies," wherein a small band of people tries to survive -- physically and psychologically -- in an inhospitable environment. In "The Exterminating Angel" you get rich women in expensive gowns forgetting how to comb their hair, and rational people falling back on religion and masonry. As the days go by the situation becomes increasingly hopeless, desperate, and -- since this is a Luis Buñuel picture -- surreal.

I'd previously watched "The Exterminating Angel" about ten years ago on a grainy multi-generation video cassette. The fact that I could barely see what was going on added to the movie's terror. But now that it's been lovingly restored on a Criterion Collection DVD I can safely say that it's even MORE disturbing when you can see every aspect of their deteriorating room, and every blemish on their wasted faces...

...and then the camera pulls back to show you that they're simply standing on the other side of an open doorway, and you get an even bigger chill up your spine.

"The Gods of Times Square"

I've just watched an amazing documentary called "The Gods of Times Square." For five years prior to 1994, a guy named Richard Sandler just walked around Times Square with his video camera, filming the preachers and the homeless people who virtually lived there before Disney swept them all away.

Besides just filming the routines and interactions in the area, Sandler does his best to draw these people out. What makes this documentary unique is that he doesn't ask them about their lives or their hardships. He doesn't approach these people from a political, social, or racial perspective. Instead, he just tries to get them to describe their religious beliefs, and he gets some amazing stuff on camera.

Some of the people are very uncomfortable about being questioned, either because they don't like to address complex issues or because they want to keep their message impersonal. Some of them also assume that he's going to make fun of them. But others simply spill out their thoughts in endless chunks, as though they'd been waiting all their lives for somebody to provoke them.

I don't know what kind of selection bias Sandler had when he picked his subjects, but most of the people are slightly insane. They're articulate and interesting, but you can very easily see the point where their logical, articulate thoughts slip away into paranoia and magic.

Other people -- particularly the Jews in the "Mitzvah Tank," the "white man is the devil" activists, and many of the calmer Christians -- appear to be more "fiery" and "driven" as opposed to insane, though there's no doubt a fine line between the two.

Things get VERY interesting when the fiery characters interact with the crazy ones. In the picture above, a street preacher is trying to get a "Jesus pledge" out of a man who says he's a "substitute teacher" who "raps with the kids" in the Bronx. The preacher is doing a straight-forward attempt at conversion, but the "teacher" keeps sticking his tongue out in a disgusting way and shouting "No, I can't say that...I love the carnal sins, I love Satan's kinky ways!"

Sandler doesn't seem to make any judgements about any of the people he interviews, though it's obvious there are some he likes more than others. He's particularly interested in James -- a recurring character who appears deliberately difficult and contrary when questioned -- and Jimmy, a shy, attractive guy who believes that Jesus lives inside him and will work through him to marry Madonna and release a hit album.

But somehow it's not a freak show. I found myself empathising with the tortured thinking of the crazy people and -- to some extent -- respecting the sheer drive and honesty of the straight-forward preachers. Part of this is because the documentary is completely without music or narration and somewhat crudely edited, with a very flat trajectory and no apparent purpose. It gets a little tiresome at almost two hours, but somehow it works. It feels more raw than most documentaries.

The most significant moment comes at the very end. Sandler is filming Jimmy, who is being gently harassed for money by a babbling homeless guy named Rog. Jimmy, for all his crazy convictions, seems almost sane and noble as he does his best to dissuade Rog while still being nice to him. Afterwards he turns to Sandler and says "Could we please put the camera away and just have some coffee and talk, like normal people?" And with this one statement he elevates himself over Sandler as well; he knows better than the filmmaker how awkward and artificial the documentary-filming process is. Somehow, for one second, he's more normal than anyone. If for nothing else, the entire film is worth it for that moment alone, and Sandler sensibly fades to black on that note.

Here's a clip that seems to have been cut out of the documentary (I haven't watched the "bonus" disc yet, so maybe it's included on there). This captures the overall style of the editing, but it's much more confrontational than anything in the actual film...Sandler and this woman (Brenda Milliner) are actually taunting. Either she somehow managed to push his buttons in a way that nobody else did, or he edited this sort of thing out of the film itself.

Touching Bass

It's time, I think, for an update!



First of all, there are some new pictures on Flickr, including the one above, which serves a few purposes: to prove that I really DO have a bass, to show off my New Year's Eve outfit (theme: "red"), and to show that my cat is either still alive or stuffed...the former is true.

As a person who has never seriously tried to learn an instrument -- let alone the theory behind playing one -- my experiences might be useful to those who want to try it themselves. I bought some self-instruction books (and a cheesy DVD starring this guy), I hooked up an amp, I tuned the strings, and then I got down to business.

In order to learn a skill I need to understand what I'm actually doing, but in this case I'm forced to realize that the background information is so specialized and esoteric that I'll need to take some of it on faith. I've learned a lot over the last few weeks -- in particular the very necessary information about WHY the strings are arranged and tuned the way they are -- but I still have a long way to go. It's humbling to learn the major scale and then turn the page and realize that it's only one of many, and that all those wonderful rules and tricks I'd assiduously practiced no longer apply.

Who can we blame for the bizarre grab-bag that is musical knowledge and perception? Lay it on the Organ of Corti.

I'm playing the examples, over and over again. As far as I can tell it's much easier to learn your scales on a fretted instrument (as opposed to one with keys) because you're just transposing your fingering up and down the neck. I'm working on the major chords and trying to keep in mind the notes I'm actually playing, to lay the groundwork necessary for actual competence (as opposed to rote repetition).

It's thrilling to me how, by just doing the same thing over and over again, you are eventually able to refine your abilities. For instance, now that I can actually play my scales without thinking about them, I can concentrate on keeping the other strings from ringing, and I can even stop staring at the frets for a short period of time.

If you want to learn the bass I DO recommend David Overthrow's book & DVD, but it's disappointing how many errors and omissions they contain. A beginner should NOT be presented with an illustration containing the wrong numbers, or be forced to puzzle out why a number isn't where you expect it to be. Otherwise it's just fun watching Overthrow playing dead-simple reggae basslines which obviously bore him to tears.

In summary: if I can maintain my enthusiasm and discipline I'll actually be able to play the bass by the spring. I won't be GOOD necessarily, but I think I'll be able to hold my own.

Otherwise life is good. I've come through the holidays relatively unchanged after my initial (and sort of inexplicable) emotional snap, with the addition that I find myself simply caring less about my own behaviour in hindsight...like, I think I've suddenly stopped worrying about such things. This could be because I've done something terrible to my shoulder -- it crackles in the morning -- and this leaves me less energy for feeling silly that I dropped the contents of my purse all over the dancefloor steps last night.

It's all a matter of perspective.

And to Syd & Gary, the removal of the blog "comment" feature started out as an accident but soon became deliberate, just because I needed to realign myself to the world, and this blog is part of that. I've turned them on again! Life is good.

Oh yes, back to the cat: she continues to be fragile and skinny, yet alert and spunky. She's had a slight rheumatic limp for about six months which has suddenly gotten a lot worse, but it hasn't stopped her from catching more mice and devouring them at my bedside, always leaving a piece behind: a black organ which looks like an olive, a veneer of pinkish blood, a tiny back foot with claws and pads attached.

The Greyhound Bus From Hell

I really don't mind taking the Greyhound. I'm always stressed about arriving on time, and I'll never understand their "don't board the bus until five minutes before departure" policy, but the trip is relatively comfortable and cheap.

Last week I wrote about the gashed-up razor-eater who skulked around the Toronto terminal until he was ejected. This week...

I took the bus on Saturday morning so I could vote in the TICOT elections. After only fifteen minutes in Toronto I returned to the bus terminal and waited to catch the return trip home.

There was only one other person waiting when I got there. Let's call him "Chatty O'Stink." He was borderline homeless and exuded an amazing stench, which he occasionally made worse by splashing perfume on himself. Mr. O'Stink REALLY wanted to talk to me, asking me all sorts of things about where I lived and why I was in Toronto. When I retreated into my book, he started touching the pages and asking me what I was reading.

"The Diary of Samuel Pepys," I said, knowing I'd never be able to explain this to him.

"I don't have any book-learning," he told me. "Can't even read and write. Didn't realize it until I was forty! Hey, did you know that Alice Cooper is coming to Kitchener?"

Chatty O'Stink wasn't a bad person, I just didn't want to get saddled with him, let alone sit next to his horrible body on the bus. So I stopped answering his questions and he eventually left me alone.

Lucky for me, though, the next arrival was a pre-teen boy with a skateboard who was either mentally handicapped or had just smoked a joint. He was frightened by Chatty O'Stink -- who was now walking around in circles and singing -- so I guess he thought I'd be a good ally against the Big Scary World. He kept turning his huge dilated pupils at me and making truncated observations like "Cold out here" and "That bus is big." He edged closer and closer. So I had to ignore him as well.

There I was, trapped between a guy who stank like the world's dirtiest armpit and a kid on drugs.

Then The Farmer arrived.

The Farmer was a short, stocky guy wearing a straw hat, except that the center portion of the hat was gone, leaving only the brim. He began to talk to Chatty O'Stink, but soon he was yelling in a way that reminded me of a big dog barking. "I DON'T CARE IF THEY DO IT, BUT DO THEY GOTTA BRAG ABOUT IT?" he screamed. "ASSF*CKERS!"

Soon The Farmer was walking up and down the growing line of passengers, by turns calm and agitated ("I HAD A BAD F*CKING DAAAAAAY!!!"). Even Chatty O'Stink became frightened, and he went to find the security guards. "That guy's crazy," said the wide-eyed pre-teen, holding his skateboard like a stuffed toy. "This line is big."

By the time the security guards arrived, The Farmer had disappeared and we'd begun boarding the bus. Chatty O'Stink chose the front seat and I sat far enough back to avoid his smell.

Suddenly, Chatty jumped up and started whispering to the bus driver. "That's him!" he was saying, pointing out the door. "That's the guy in the hat!"

"A seat's a seat," said the bus driver. The next thing we knew The Farmer had boarded the bus...and sat down next to Chatty. Things were tense.

All good things come in threes, of course. Our next wonderful passenger was a drunken red-faced guy wearing sunglasses who sat directly behind The Farmer. This was like an intricate chess problem being constructed, the kind where everybody ends up dying.

The drunk noticed that none of the seats in the bus had headrests. "This is a liability!" he kept saying. "There isn't a single seat in this bus with a head rest!"

"You're talking to the wrong guy," said the bus driver simply.

"Just don't drive like a maniac! I don't wanna get whiplash, man."

"You can get out now if you like."

"Oh, no no no." He kept looking for confirmation from the other passengers that he was making a valid point, turning around and staring and shaking his head. Then he'd get up and wander halfway down the aisle, make a sound of disgust, then come back to his seat again.

He had to make a big show of how much neck support he required, so he clumsily opened the overhead compartment to get his jacket out and make a pillow out of it...

...and he knocked The Farmer's straw hat off.

We froze. All of us were staring. We'd seen The Farmer's level of emotional stability in the terminal and we'd found it lacking. The Farmer picked up his hat, sat back down, and began to flip his head forward and backward, apparently to straighten out his hair. Then his head began to oscillate slowly from side to side as Chatty O'Stinky leaned as far away as possible. I felt very sorry for him.

The bus driver started the bus, and he announced that we'd be making the usual stop in Cambridge on the way to Kitchener. "WHAT?!?" yelled the drunk. "What's this about CAMBRIDGE?!?"

"It's on the schedule" said the bus driver.

"How long's that gonna take?"

"Fifteen minutes or so."

"That's bullsh*t" said the drunk, turning his red face to his fellow passengers to bask in their adulation.

The Farmer turned around and said "You could always walk."

Ooooo. Total silence now. I'm sure I wasn't the only one considering exiting the bus. This could NOT be a happy ending...

...but somehow it WAS. You know how some tough guys sort of half-wilt when their bluff is called, and their derision turns to respect? The driver had been polite and unyielding, and now The Farmer had dealt with him. Somehow this defused all of the drunk's anger. Within fifteen minutes the four of them -- the drunk, the driver, The Farmer, AND Chatty O'Stink -- were deep in a discussion about hockey, though The Farmer kept getting distracted by the voices in his head. He wanted to talk about all the bus rides he'd ever taken. Occasionally the drunk would retreat to the bathroom and come out stinking of booze, rubbing his little red eyes and massaging his unsupported neck.

What's going on? After fifteen years of trouble-free bus rides, suddenly I'm stuck dealing with crazy people, with the added bonus of a few recent stabbings to keep us on edge. Are they giving bus passes to these people just to get them out of town?

I leave you with The Farmer's favourite joke, which he made up on the spot and seemed to find delightful. While we were stopped in Cambridge, The Farmer wanted to stand up and go for a walk. Chatty O'Stinky told him not to. "They won't let you off, they won't let you off." He said.

"UNLESS YOU COUGH!" yelled The Farmer, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Ceres"

Here's "Ceres" by Harrison Dowd, from the April 20, 1929 issue of The New Yorker.

I have honestly never seen these "pigeon people," but they appear so often in fiction of all eras that I can only assume they're out there...probably in larger cities.

Little gray woman
Mad as a loon,
Feeding all morning,
All afternoon,

Grain to your pigeons
In your old blue cloak,
How long is it
Since your whole brain broke?

How long ago
Did you first go mad?
Was it drink, or a lover
That you never had?

What day did your mind
In a whir of soft words
Split and scatter
Like scared gray birds?

Harrison Dowd himself -- like many poets from The New Yorker -- has been largely forgotten, but he did write a book that's still remembered: "The Night Air," a "homosexual novel" from the 1950s that sounds pretty interesting. He was apparently a Broadway character actor from the late '20s to the mid '60s.

I guess poetry wasn't his thing.

In Praise of Morley Callaghan

I first heard about Morley Callaghan while reading Carolyn Strange's mostly-dire "Toronto's Girl Problem." She presented Callaghan's book "Strange Fugitive" (about bootleggers and gangsters in Toronto during 1928) as a deliberate attempt to counter Toronto's self-proclaimed squeaky-clean image.

Before reading "Strange Fugitive," however, I ran across Callaghan's short story "Escapade" in The New Yorker. I fell in love, and found myself wondering how I'd missed reading his work for so many years.

Callaghan's fiction has been mostly overshadowed by his colourful life; his brief stay in Paris and his friendship with Ernest Hemmingway, who he famously K.O.'d in a boxing match. He has also been dismissed by some as a hack who hammered out short stories and novels which rarely deviated from his established style (or, as some have interpreted it, a complete LACK of style).

But his style is so GOOD. I have never read Hemmingway's work but Callaghan's straight-forward, undecorated prose is often compared to his. He uses no excess words, no colourful adjectives, no metaphor. His stores are written in an almost journalistic style along the lines of "These are the people and this is what happened to them."

I just finished the first volume of Callaghan's four-volume "Complete Stories" and I've noticed that his REAL genius was the limited nature of his omniscient narrator: he tells us what his characters are thinking but never delves into their motivations or tries to interpret their thoughts, let alone judge them. Since most of us -- like Callaghan's "everyday Joe" sort of characters -- fool ourselves constantly with rationalizations and repression, each story is a slow peeling-away of motivation, until you're left with the bare and unambiguous working of the protagonist's soul.

This is what makes Callaghan's fiction so spectacular. He captures what it really feels like to exist and to think in the limited way that us people do. Using the simplest language he conveys human complexity without every appearing DELIBERATE about it. As always, "These are the people and this is what happened."

He can get a bit tedious, I admit. By avoiding flowery language Callaghan tends to frequently use the same adjectives ("plump") and you get a BIT tired of every story opening the same way. But that's what he did, and it's what he did best. If you have never read a Morley Callaghan book then you really, really should.

"Wild Geese" by Martha Ostenso

Literary modernism had to arrive in the prairie provinces sometime. In 1925 it struck with a bang in the form of Martha Ostenso's classic novel "Wild Geese."

It's an evil book, a study of non-stop emotional abuse in a pioneer family. Caleb Gare, an up-and-coming farmer -- uses subtle psychology as a daily torture against his wife and children, primarily because he loves the power, partially because he views his family as free labour...but underneath it all he does it because it AMUSES him. And that's what makes the book really wicked.

"Wild Geese" is mainly told from the point of view of Lind Archer, a new teacher in the community who is billeted with the Gare family. She arrives when Caleb's power is already entrenched, and she watches in amazement as it spreads unchecked throughout the neighbourhood. Everybody hates Caleb but they are either too unsophisticated or too good-natured to stop the terrible, quiet building of his influence.

Caleb's power comes mainly from discovering secrets, leveraging them to force other farmers to grant him favours or give him land. Caleb controls Amelia, his wife, with the knowledge of a previous infidelity which lead to an illegitimate child. Amelia is terrified that the child -- Mark -- will someday find out that he is the bastard child of a poor farmer's wife, and the fact that Mark arrives in the neighbourhood near the beginning of the book makes the situation much more immediate.

You see, every time one of Caleb's children engages in an act of rebellion, Caleb unleashes a torrent of threats against Amelia, chief among them that he will tell Mark who his real parents were, thus ruining his life. The children don't know this secret but they pity the fate of their mother and -- more importantly -- they are convinced that this "secret" might involve them somehow; they know how vengeful Caleb can be when crossed, so they live in perpetual submission, worried that the mysterious and dreadful secret could come out and make their lives even worse.

As a modern reader I had difficulty getting worked up about this secret; in fact, I kept waiting for somebody to say "Hey, Caleb, nobody CARES who Mark's parents were." But the book is so sincere about this issue that I can only assume that parentage WAS a make-or-break issue for small-town Canadians in the 1920s. And since the whole book revolves around this issue I had to get over those feelings pretty quick.

95% of "Wild Geese" is brilliant, an elaborately-constructed showcase of Caleb's ability to terrorize and manipulate those around him. I was totally absorbed in the story and had difficulty putting it down, I just couldn't WAIT to see how Caleb's influence would eventually be thwarted.

But therein lies one of the book's problems: there are a half dozen explicitly revealed set-ups for Caleb's eventual fall, but the one that's finally used comes mostly out of nowhere and has no bearing on the characters themselves. Rather than have the abused children, the resentful neighbours, or the subversive "big city" influence of Lind Archer bring the old tyrant down, he is eventually laid low in a way that has a BIT of poetic justice but does no credit to the hard work of the protagonists themselves. This was most unsatisfying.

I also found the shifting points-of-view to be sketchy at times and the ham-handed symbolism was downright annoying -- the lonely call of the wild geese, the comforting shroud of romantic rain, the oil-filled curse of the flax, the nearsighted daughter -- and while all this could be excused by the fact that Ostenso was a first-time author, it has recently come to light that the book was effectively co-written by Douglas Durkin.

Still, it's a beautiful, torturous work, and I'm glad I picked it up (entirely on a whim) and finally got around to reading it.

PS: If you've read the book, consider the situation of Charlie Gare, Caleb's youngest child. While the other children are fully-fleshed characters with lots of dialog and "book presence," Charlie is only ever mentioned in passing and he is laughably forgotten in the final chapters -- his masquerade ball costume is the only one that isn't described (except that it has a "peaked cap") and his fate is completely skipped at the end.

Do you think that Ostenso only put him in at the last minute when she realized that Caleb needed an even number of children to do the threshing?

My Latest Facebook Friend Wannabe: Taygun Kuşçu!

Recently I mentioned an interesting Facebook phenomenon, wherein I receive "friend" requests from totally unknown men from far-off lands who CLAIM to be interested in women, but whose friends are all transsexuals with their legs prominently on display.

I present a typical character, Taygun Kuşçu.



I certainly don't begrudge a fetishy person looking for sex -- we all have our quirks, and I'm the one wearing tights after all -- but it's the "interested in women" thing that continues to baffle me. And I don't feel bad posting this guy's profile because he has tried to contact me based on the most tenuous information. Also his hair is unpleasant.

"I Am A Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter

To end my obsessive re-reading of classic computer literature I tossed in Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop," which really has nothing to do with the topic at all. It's a rigorous explanation of Hofstadter's views on consciousness and "I"-ness, all based on his concept of "strange loops."

A strange loop is a (potentially) infinitely-recursive loop of (potentially) infinite symbols. Many of these symbols are much larger than the loop itself, which is just the beginning of the Gödelian properties they involve. Most importantly, each level of a strange loop can be perceived and analyzed by the levels above it...and out of this strange configuration, says Hofstadter, arises the illusion we call "consciousness."

This is basically a pithy restating of the ideas he presented in 1979's "Gödel, Escher, Bach," with much (though not all) of the mathematical explanations, symbolic logic, and whimsicality removed. I've been through GEB twice and have never gotten as clear a picture of strange loops as I got from "I Am A Strange Loop," so Hofstadter certainly achieved his main goal: to clarify GEB for everybody who didn't "get it."

But even though "I Am A Strange Loop" contains some crucial and rigorously-outlined revelations, I doubt that a non-convert would agree with it (let alone enjoy it). Hofstadter dismisses any dualistic approaches to consciousness (such as an intangible "soul material") and gives us an explanation where "I" am only aware of "I" because "I" am one of many interrelated strange loops in my cranium. The essence of "I" cannot be isolated because it is simply a pattern which arises from situations which allow strange loops; it is not anything mystical or divine (though it IS mysterious and wonderful!) Hofstadter even shows us that "I" cannot be confined to a single brain...and therein lies the humanistic side of his approach.

So those who believe in traditional, consciousness-invoking souls will not enjoy Hofstadter's ruminations, and neither will reductionists who want to actually find and observe the mechanics of consciousness. All who's left are those of us who already sort of believed Hofstadter's ideas before he graced us with a real explanation and an arsenal of terms to use.

If you decide you want to give it a try, "I Am A Strange Loop" is mostly an easy read. Hofstadter repeats and explains his salient points many times, often using half a dozen analogies to define each one (and to show how alternate points of view are much sillier than his are). He also shares many of his own life experiences, not -- as he says in the introduction -- because he's particularly egocentric, but because he believes these life experiences are things we can all relate to. And I think he's right.

If anything, the most difficult thing about this book are Hofstadter's "friendly, informal" quirks -- what he calls his "doggies and bunnies" approach. The puns are bad and the anecdotes intensely personal. This is both a strength and a weakness.

Do I believe in strange loops now? I think they're the best explanation for consciousness that I've ever run across, and they've already changed the way I deal with people...but believing Hofstadter's ideas is not really a springboard to other things. "I Am A Strange Loop" tells you more what consciousness ISN'T, which I think is useful, but knowing what it IS won't have an affect on most people in the long run.

Psycho-Gifts for Christmas!

While the Victorians loved their Freud, the '20s were all about behaviourism and personality tests...everybody was taking quizzes and using behaviour modification to keep their children in line. Skinner hadn't arrived on the scene yet but Watson was very, very popular.

This is the first time I've seen the fad so obviously presented in The New Yorker. It's a Christmas advertisement for Wanamaker's Department Store in the December 8, 1928 issue.

The advertisement claims that Wanamaker's has analyzed the neurotic complexes of "the world and his wife" (!), and that you should purchase Christmas gifts for people based on their own personal complexes.

To start this game we hand you a little book which lists suggestions for gifts under psychological classifications...

Start the game with your friends.

Play the game of choosing psycho-gifts. It is fascinating...

A treasure hunt, indeed, that will give you a greater Christmas thrill than you ever had before.

Forget the fact that behaviourism didn't believe in complexes per se, this could still be fun if they were using the good, old-fashioned, traditional Freudian complexes. Should you buy starchy underwear for the man with castration anxiety, or orthopedic shoes for sufferers of an Oedipus complex?

But no. As you'd expect, the "complexes" as illustrated are actually just a list of vague personality "types," making the astute observation that children only HAVE one type: "Children."

A treasure hunt that will give you a greater thrill? Nope, just another sad gimmick to get you to buy Christmas gifts. But I don't understand why the bellhop has an exposed catheter, let alone why the housewife is admiring cat poop on the brand new rug.