Moby Dick

Only two books have ever defeated me: "Ulysses" and "Moby Dick." I tried to read both of them during my eager first year of University, and I put both of them down halfway through.

"Ulysses" annoyed me because the references seemed deliberately obscure, and I felt that I didn't have a hope in hell of understanding even the simplest layer, let alone any of the layers that would make the struggle worthwhile.

But why didn't I like "Moby Dick?" I'm loving it now -- like, I'm REALLY in love with it -- and I can only assume that, back then, I expected faster pace and less florid language. At that time I was reading Ballard, Barth, and Barthleme, so Melville with all of his wordy digressions sounded like a bloviating old coot.

Maybe I've grown to appreciate bloviating old coots, or maybe my long-ago first attempt has softened the way a bit. The book is constantly surprising me. It's inventive and detailed, and Melville manages to describe the stark world of whalers in a paradoxically rich way. The cannibal Queequeg is a special delight, both in his satirically primitive oddness and in the gentle way that Melville treats him. Of all the "Christian" men, Queequeg is the most worthy...and also the funniest.

He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.

"Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.

"Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt him face."

Brilliant, Weird, and Stupid Neil Young

I've never thought much about Neil Young. My parents owned some of his early albums and I was friends with an obsessive Young-ophile, but he only entered my consciousness when he did something brilliant, weird, or stupid.

A guy named R. loaned me Neil Young's "Human Highway" DVD, which I was anxious to see because of its colourful reputation and its high Devo-goodness conent. The movie, true to form, is a cynical, stoned-out, incomprehensible mess...but it captivates somehow, like an exotic and somewhat scary child's toy.

I also found myself liking Young's music in the film, which was largely pulled from his equally infamous vocoder-dominated album "Trans." I asked R. if I could borrow the album. Typically, R. gave me a DVD containing Young's entire music catalog from 1963 to 2006. And I can't possess an exhaustive catalog without listening to it all.

So I'm working my way through Neil Young's music, from beginning ("The Mynah Birds") to the end (so far). Sometimes I think he's one of the best songwriters around, and sometimes I think he writes like somebody who couldn't care less. I love his crunchy Crazy Horse stuff and I'm less enamored with his sort of whiny, over-serious folk material. I remember how gratifying it was to see decrepit, ugly Neil kicking Pearl Jam's butt during the MTV Music Video awards many years ago. The guy can really play guitar. Eddie Vedder bothers me.

I can't see myself going on a massive music-buying spree here, but my respect for Neil Young has gone up significantly. And he mixes with Devo better than you'd ever imagine.

PS: I agonized over whether to add a "Canadiana" tag to this post. We treat Neil Young like a native son when he succeeds, and we deride him as an American sell-out when he embarasses us. I doubt that Young himself considers himself to be a Canadian after all these years...so no tag for you, Mr. Yankee.

Impressions from the Unofficial Waterloo Park Nature Show

Sitting on a park bench inside a boardwalk gazebo, Silver Lake spread out in front of me. The lake is motionless and looks like a child's science project: stagnant clouds of algae and bird shit. Big green fish swim in and out of sight, catching water striders while a young rough-looking kid tries to entice them with a fishing rod. His lure is an algae-coloured blob with a bright red mast. The fish aren't fooled and they go about their business.

To my left is a mother duck, with five ducklings just out of the egg. She's the most non-chalant duck I've ever seen and I can't decide whether she's stupid or just unconcerned. They have a tiny patch of gravelly duck-beach among the weeds, and while the babies swim languidly through the muck the mother just stands and stares. She stares at the swans and at the ubiquitous single blue heron in the middle of the lake. It's a lazy day for ducks, apparently.

Human parents bring their children to look at the dirty-water-nature-show. They come and go under the shade of the gazebo, some of them pushing elaborate multi-child carriages with embedded toys and little grasping hands. Everyone is enchanted by the swans, who glide back and forth like stage performers, sometimes diving under to clean their feathers, sometimes floating lazily with only one foot docked on tailfeathers.

Two siblings are particularly interesting, a boy and a girl. The boy is the face of evil, a well-spoken manipulator already, he knows how to work his mom. He throws a piece of garbage at the baby ducks, and his mother says no..."garbage goes in the garbage can." He picks up a scrap of paper and says "this garbage goes in the garbage can!" and then walks slightly away from his mother and throws the paper on the grass when she isn't looking. He tells his mother how beautiful the baby ducks are, and then throws pebbles at them when his mother is distracted. The younger sister does the same.

Meanwhile there's an ongoing sparrow drama above my head. Two different families have established nests opposite to each other in the rafters. In between bobbing around looking for gravel and cheerios and nesting material, the parents stand by their nests and yell at each other. Tension builds until one male finally encroaches on the wrong nest, and then the chase is on. The males attack each other, pecking viciously. A third sparrow, apparently a bystander, joins in the fight. One of the mama sparrows flies down and now there are four of them in a big, jumping mass of feathers and beaks and little kicking feet. They roll behind the bushes and carry on fighting for no reason other than revenge and wounded pride. The squawking is terrible.

Far off is the giant blue heron in a position of prestige. You often see him around town. He is aloof and serious, the king of the birds, unmolested by virtue of his size and solitude. When his head is up he looks like a dinosaur ancestor; head down, he looks like a hooded ghoul. He alone among the waterfowl has too much pride for begging.

The rough-looking fisherman has gone. A long-haired couple sits on the dock, quietly, girl's head on boy's shoulder. There's a chipmunk here and a gentle father with his son. The son is fat and totally absorbed with the water; he sees sunfish and points them out, and the father follows, approving, loving him.

Vaudeville

From February 5, 1948's episode of "It Pays to Be Ignorant"

Lulu McConnell: Before I left home this morning, I rocked my husband to sleep.

Tom Howard: Awww, that's sweet.

Lulu McConnell: Yeah, you should've seen the rock I used.

Rick Veitch

I am not a reader of comics, I guess because I rarely find a comic that I like. I don't think superheroes are exciting and lycra just doesn't appeal to me. Even when comics get all dystopian, I still can't help thinking that most of them are mass-produced pulp.

Way back in February 1983 I was suffering through an extremely dull visit with my grandparents. My father -- equally bored -- took me down to the Short Stop and promised to buy me a magazine. I saw a brilliant cover of a dead angel in the water and decided that it was the one for me: Epic Illustrated #16, a quote-unquote "adult comic" monthly that gradually died under the commercial pressure of rival Heavy Metal's T&A.

Epic was great. After tossing out all my issues when I first moved from home, I've managed to re-collect them all and see them again through adult eyes. Sure they were selling sex -- even a little kid could see that -- but more often than not their stories were also complex, intelligent, and downright strange. And they could be really gross too.

Strangest, grossest, and brainiest of all in issue #16 was an episode of Rick Veitch's ongoing saga, "Abraxas and the Earthman." A looney re-telling of the Moby Dick saga, it had the great (red) whale pursued by a peg-legged madman...through space, assisted by an earthman with all his skin ripped off, his disembodied head sidekick, a six-breasted leopared-woman, and a swarm of manipulative insect creatures who could creep into the subconscious and smush your brain together. And that's just for starters.

I loved all of Veitch's Epic comic creations -- man-eating banana-plants, sentient suns, pre-Matrix men caught in a computer virtual reality, sexy bulls, a John Waters look-alike with a horrific sexually-transmitted disease -- and I later discovered his work on Swamp thing, and then his TRULY twisted graphic novels. I love his loose plotting style, the long story detours that usually end up in the most unexpected places. I love his depressingly average people who suddenly suffer catastrophic revelations. Most of all I love his human faces: greasy people with brow-wrinkles and acne, messy stubble, inbred chins and stupid eyes. Nobody draws a redneck like Rick Veitch does.

Not only has "Abraxas and the Earth Man" finally been released on graphic novel format, but Veitch is working on a six-part mini-series called "Army@Love." I'm coming into it late and I've just read the first six issues. It's a vile satire of the Iraq war. Sometimes it clubs you with a sledgehammer, but it's most effective when it's subtle.

Veitch doesn't have much love for war profiteers and bumper-sticker patriots...as it should be. In his "Afbaghistan," soldiers are being enticed with promises of excitement and kicks, where the ultimate high is to have sex during combat and therefore join the "Hot Zone Club." This is the only way the government can continue to market the conflict after ten years of an impossible war.

As sick and tasteless as that Lynnie England cover of issue #2 is, Veitch is dead on...but he's also weaving a great story, and he's the only person who could get me buying a monthly comic again.

And I'm not just saying that because I've been in love with him since 1983.

"Constant Reader"

In the latter months of 1927, "Constant Reader" started a series of book reviews in The New Yorker called "Reading and Writing." True to the title they were much more than just simple reviews. In this article from the distressingly-long November 19, 1927 issue (the issues got fatter around Christmas, mainly due to increased advertising), "Constant Reader" spends most of her word count telling us about her paper-cutter:

There was a time when that paper-cutter and I were like sisters. Whever I went, there was the paper-cutter. I would sit down in a comfortable chair, and there it was; I would step out of bed on a crisp Winter morning, and there it was; I would reach into the dim depths of a bureau drawer, and there it was, again. I grew to know it so well that I had my own secret pet-name for it. I used to call it "that lousy thing."

Yes, "Constant Reader" was actually Dorothy Parker, and it's a delight to have her finally join the magazine full time. As anxious as I am for The New Yorker to finally get somewhat SERIOUS -- beyond Morris Markey's brilliant news columns and the ongoing expose of Broadway graft -- at least Dorothy Parker's jokes are DIFFERENT. She had a unique style that I won't try to analyze until I've finally read that huge collection of her work that I have sitting in my bookshelf.

The Strange Case of Anna Kavan

The first blog entry I ever wrote had something to do with Anna Kavan; I think I was reading her book "Let Me Alone" at the time. I've just finished George Saunder's "In Persuasion Nation" -- funny, cynical, nasty, and ultimately touching -- and tonight, waiting anxiously for a thunderstorm that is taking its own sweet time arriving, I'm following it up with Kavan's "Mercury."

My parents bought me a collection of her stories (called "My Madness") about ten years ago, apparently because it looked like something I'd enjoy. But I didn't read the book until last summer. The stories were choppy, undisciplined, and sort of aimless -- and I was less than impressed with "Ice," her supposed masterpiece -- but the genius (and her madness) of Anna Kavan really got under my skin: the Kafka-esque protagonists, the woman with a mouse in her bra, and the terrifying dance that birds do when they think nobody's watching.

It's taken a lot of effort to track down her novels. Kavan originally published under two different names -- her maiden name and then her married name -- before suffering a catastrophic nervous breakdown, bleaching her hair, becoming uncomfortably thin, and changing her name to "Anna Kavan," a recurring tragic character from her earlier novels. She also worked for different publishers and most of her books never went beyond an initial small run.

Kavan basically wrote the same story over and over again, and I don't mean that in a subtle way. Many of her novels are about overbearing mothers who raise emotionally stunted daughters, who in turn marry unappealing men who take them to live in a far-eastern country and -- eventually -- drive them to desperate acts. Her other novels are about alienated, awkward, post-breakdown (and potentially post-apocalyptic) men and women who grasp feebly at unattainable goals. "Mercury" is shaping up to be the second type of story, and at first blush it seems like either an early draft or a reworking of "Ice," right down to...well, all the ice in it.

Her books make me uncomfortable, partly because I can see so much of ME in her characters, but mainly because they're so personal. Kavan writes about herself in a uniquely ugly magic realism style; she's rarely funny or hopeful, and the surreal elements just circle around and around, repeating, never reaching a conclusion. I guess you'd expect that sort of writing from a life-long heroin addict, though according to her doctor the heroin was the only thing that kept her going at all.

While you're waiting for the rain to come and the trees lean ominously in the intermittent wind, Anna Kavan is certainly the author to read.

Keeping Cool

We're deep in a hot, muggy period in Kitchener, the first test of the hot, cold, active, and stagnant areas of my new apartment. By keeping the lights off and building a chain of fans on the second floor I can create a nice column of moving air from west to east, even if the air isn't necessarily cool.

My cat's paws are extraordinarily hot and she likes to put them on my arms while she's sleeping. Otherwise she spends much of her time behind the TV set, which is on the first floor and therefore cooler. Up here on the second floor I find myself bumbling around in the dark a lot. When working in my "Little Lemuria" music studio I do my best to tune the fans out and have as few pieces of equipment running as possible.

One way to beat the heat? Sleep in the afternoon! I decided to take a short nap and ended up sleeping deeply for four hours. Now I'm awake and it's relatively cool (or rather "no longer stifling") and I'm thinking it would be nice to go out on the balcony and sit with the cat.

Some ways to stay cool when you're a pedestrian:

1. Walk slightly slower than normal; the more humid air you breathe in, the more exhausted you get.
2. Plot your route so that you avoid reflective and radiating surfaces (ashphalt, glass, steel) and, instead, walk through places with lots of grass. Hell, just walk on the grass, even if they tell you not to! Blame it on the city planners.
   
3. Love each and every tree you walk under. Their shade is essential.
4. Stay away from cars; they're sources of heat and bad air.
5. Drink something cold as you walk.

In short: two-way roads are bad, parking lots are REALLY bad, residential streets are good, and parks are an absolute blessing.

Elizabeth Arden Lifts Your Organs

I've run across this image in the last few New Yorker issues, and even though I (sort of) know what they're doing, I still think I'm looking at people with severe physical disabilities.

But no! They're doing corrective exercises! As described in the November 19, 1927 issue:

EVERY WOMAN wants a figure of smooth flowing lines. Corrective exercise and relaxation, as taught by Elizabeth Arden, will proportion your figure, lift your organs and correct every fault of carriage, of slugishness and of weight. Elizabeth Arden builds a lovely skin and a lovely figure on a foundation of superb health.

If I'd end up looking like THESE women, I'll pass, 'Liz.

Drag Conflict

After Saturday night's Guelph Pride event -- which I STILL need to write about -- I started thinking that getting back into drag shows might be fun. I stopped regularly going to shows for a lot of reasons, mainly to avoid the politics, the hassle of preparation, the endless waiting for the next number, the personal insecurity, and the sadness of dealing with occasional damaged people. Not to mention feeling like crap at my job the next day.

Tonight I wanted to see some of the Miss Tri-Pride pageant, and it was also a bit of a test to see if I could get back into Thursday night drag shows without suffering too much the next day. I saw four excellent performers, all with different styles, all whom I feel a great deal of affection for. I watched the well-known phenomenon of a crowd simply not responding in an obvious way to a great performance, which gives me cold chills and makes me start viewing all human beings -- myself included -- as a bunch of Skinner rats in an inbred social experiment that I prefer not to be a part of.

But I also see love, and creativity, and continuity, which I tend not to notice when I'm actually PART of an all-night open drag show. The good stuff is there, but I'm too busy worrying about costume changes and alcohol intake and blood sugar to just relax and have fun. Not to mention that, sometimes, when I have "fun" I become socially disconnected and relate to other people in confusing ways.

My boiled-down generalized point is that -- as always -- there are reasons for and against doing drag. I see a lot of happy things and a lot of sad things, and I also see the best and worst of myself, and the best and worst of the other performers and the audience. I'm struck by the extremely complex, multi-layered social event that is a drag show: competition, comeraderie, sexual attraction, gender confusion, insecurity, stupidity, creativity, viciousness, misunderstandings, jealousy, favouritism, booze & drugs, energy, adulation, honesty & fakery, fakery, fakery.

Do drag kings have it easier? I'm curious. How about strippers? Cage dancers? Karaoke queens?