Last night on a British discussion show called Hard Talk, the host, a tough black woman who is the ultimate, no-holds barred devil's advocate-to-end-all-devil's advocates, asked Canada's Stephen Lewis, the UN Representative for Aids in Africa, whether he is ever frustrated, fed-up, ready to throw in the towel, simply because this monumental medical and humanitarian task is too massive to contemplate, let alone act upon. Let alone solve.
"Of course not," he said. "What good has ever come out of futility?"
Ah, futility. Despair. The acknowledgement that the world is a cruel, unfair place, and that we are doomed to small lives made even smaller by the realization that life is short and death is long.
This is what we can learn in university, what we should learn, but I think too much of this concept has permeated our daily lives, to the point where effort itself and the urge to help your fellow man has become a quaint, almost antiquated position, rather than the driving, relentless force it should and must be.
One of the advantages of a liberal-arts university education is that it allows you to examine and roll around in your heads concepts that you had never considered before -- or, if you had thought about them, such an education gives you a forum to discuss these ideas in a little more depth than your Grade 13 high school English allows. (Oh, that's right -- there is no more Grade 13, or OAC, in Ontario high schools anymore. But you get the point. I hope.)
The most interesting class I took in my freshman year at York University in those long-ago and far-away autumn days of '94 was called 'Psychology and Politics'. I had no idea what I was in for. I was a film major who loved movies and novels. Period. Any ideas about psychology I had were probably formed by Alan Thicke (a Canadian, by the way, from Kirkland Lake, Ontario) on Growing Pains, his character being a stay-at-home psychiatrist dad and all. (If you think I'm joking, you probably don't know how much t.v. I used to watch.) What I knew about politics came from Oliver Stone's J.F.K. and Spike Lee's Malcolm X. And maybe the old 'Royal Canadian Air Farce' (on the radio, before they had their t.v. show) and the political sketches on Saturday Night Live (Dana Carvey as Ross Perot and the elder Bush, and Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukkakis in one of the debates, saying my all-time favorite line: "My parents were little people. Little, swarthy people...")
The teacher's name was Paul Roazen, a skinny, crusty, curly-haired bespectacled old character. A few things impressed me right away:
1) He was an American. I'd never had an American teacher before. (I'd met Americans before, of course, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Buffalo and Orlando, but had never had much of a, I don't know, conversation with one.) This was different. This was exotic.
2) He had not only written books, but had actually published them. He was a Freud expert, Roazen was (and presumably still is, if he's still alive), and I was stunned, floored by the fact that I could actually go to the York Library and read books written by somebody who was teaching me. I barely knew who Freud was, but I was greatly impressed that Roazen had interviewed Freud's relatives -- sister, cousins, the whole extended family. (He may even have tripped on the carpet in their homes, which would have been a Freudian slip.) I remember reading his book 'Brother Animal', not because I was interested in Freud, really, but because it was very cool to read a book and have the author of said book mumble 'good morning' to me on a twice-weekly basis. I didn't get many published, bona-fide authors speaking to me at my high school in St.Catharines. Of course, I can't really remember, now, ten years on, what 'Brother Animal' was actually about, but that's irrelevant; the fact was, at the time, he had written it, and I could read it, and that was enough.
3) Roazen had actually been employed, lectured, taught at Harvard. I was amazed by this. I knew that Harvard was a real, honest-to-goodness, like, I don't know, place, but it existed in some other, distant realm of existence. (It still seems to, actually.) The closest I'd been to Harvard was watching that Joe Pesci movie With Honors with Greg Gaspari and Eric Daigle at the Town Cinemas on Geneva Street in St.Catharines, the one starring Brendan Fraser and Joe Pesci, the one where Pesci plays a homeless person who crashes lectures at the school. ("I may be a bum," Pesci says, "but I'm a Harvard bum.") I would have been impressed if Roazen had actually been to Harvard, if he'd walked around the campus or checked out the dorms or even eaten in the cafeteria of the place; the fact that he had been a lecturer there, well, that was enough to make me want to listen to him. And I did, sitting in the front row of the lecture hall each and every morning of the class, watching as he strolled into the room looking like he had something very, very important to say.
4) Roazen refused to use a microphone, the little ones that professors attach to their lapels. The fact that professors got to use microphones at all impresed me; the fact that this dude refused that honor made him an intriguing and eccentric fellow right from the first day. I didn't know why he abandoned the mike, until I heard him speak. The thing is, Roazen liked to speak. He liked to roar. He liked to lecture without notes and pace the room and bellow not only to the back of the room, but to the back of the room beside the one he was teaching in.
("Become who you ARE!" he screamed one day, quoting Nietscheze the week we were reading 'Beyond Good and Evil.' He loved that line, Roazen did. Because of him, and his intensity, so do I.)
Two anecdotes that sum up his character, as I remember it:
Anecdote one:
The morning after the Academy Awards. A bitter-cold, snowy March day. Roazen sits at the desk at the front of the lecture hall, reading through the results of the Oscars in the paper. He looks mystified. He shakes his head. He looks up and startes at me, 'cause I'm sitting in the front row, right in front of him. In the line of fire, so to speak.
"I haven't heard of any of these people!" he says, almost in an accusing tone, as if I had had something to do with the fact that the Best Supporting Actress winner remained a mystery to him. I said nothing, smiling a goofy freshman smile. What was I supposed to say? (I wanted to say: "Sir, you're a sixty-five year old neurotic intellectual who gets off on interviewing Freud's sister -- why should you know any of these people?") He continued to stare at me, then sighed, at what I'm not sure. Maybe his own age, or my inability to explain modern Hollywood's social structure. Maybe both.
(I used to think he was an out-of-it old coot for not recognizing even the most famous of actors, until I found myself in Asia for five years, scanning the Internet and reading about the latest celebrities, muttering: "I haven't heard of any of these people!")
Anecdote two:
Roazen was speaking passionately, roaming the room, and then he looked up and noticed that one student, a freshman girl (freshwoman?) I recognized from my film class, was not taking any notes. (Actually, in Canada we usually just say 'first-year', not 'freshman', but anyway...)
"You're not interested in what I have to say?" Roazen asked her. "You can remember all of this?"
"Oh," the girl said, somewhat surprised. "It's not that. The thing is, I'm a film major?"
Roazen glared. "AND?"
"And so, you know, I don't feel the need to take notes? Because pen and paper and all that kind of stuff are on the way out? Because film is the future?" Every sentence ending in a question.
Roazen, stunned. Roazen, speechless. Roazen, still. Unmoving. The only thing moving was his head, as he scanned the room, looking at the rest of us for help, support, understanding. I saw his whole life flash before his eyes -- once, he had been in the same room as Freud's sister, unlocking the secrets of the the master's mind; once, he had been at Harvard, teaching the best and the brightest of America's elite; and now, now, here, here, he was in a lecture hall in North York, Ontario, Canada, of all places, far removed from Vienna, light years from the ivy-league of Boston's best, and --
Ah, but it was pointless. He sighed, and continued his lecture.
Roazen's class was the first one that royally, even galactically, messed with my head.
Because he set it up in an interestingly sly and deceptive way, you see.
The first book we read was John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'. Mill was the nineteenth century British child prodigy who had read all of Shakespeare and most of Milton by, like, eight or something ridiculous. (Ah, but by age eight I had read all of WEST COAST AVENGERS and X-FACTOR and ALPHA FLIGHT, the jewel in Marvel Comics crown, as far as I was concerned. WEST COAST AVENGERS being the California branch of the the regular Avengers, the super-hero team with Captain America as their leader, usually accompanied by Thor and Iron-Man and the Hulk and Ant-Man and the Wasp, and they're usually based in New York, right, but then they started out this L.A. branch, see, and I bought the first issue, the one with the super-archer Hawkeye as their leader, bought it at Muskie Bay cottages in the north of Ontario while I was on vacation as a kid, and I saw on the Net that Hawkeye is now a bad guy, went crazy or something, which is blasphemy, in my book. And X-FACTOR had the original X-Men back together, because, unlike the movies, Wolverine was not part of the original group, no, he didn't join until, like, the seventies. This is the group that had Angel and the Beast and Marvel-Girl and, best, of all, Iceman, who was so cool, literally, and I remember he got his own limited series, four issues it was, and I read the first issue sitting in the still-being-built kitchen of our new house on Evangelista Court, by the lake, dust all around, me sitting on the unfinished counter, and oh do I remember that. And ALPHA FLIGHT, well, that was a Canadian super-hero team based out of Ottawa, which was really, really cool. Their Captain was Vindicator, later Guardian, whose suit resembled Captain America's, except with a Canadian flag instead of a Yankee one, and he actually looked quite a bit like a Canadian-made super-hero called Captain Canuck, who was also very cool. So I don't think John Stuart Mill had read any of these Marvel Comics, you know, so he had his flaws, he did. That's all I'm saying.)
Mill patented the idea of utilitarianism -- the greatest good for the greatest number of people is what's best for society. People are logical, rational creatues, Mill stated. If you give them the opportunity to do good, to look after others, to help out society, mankind will choose this option. Mankind will take care of its own and look out for its own.
Sounded good to me. Made sense. 'On Liberty', the text, was a bit dry, but hey -- the guy probably popped it off in an afternoon or two, right? In between composing symphonies or establishing the British legal system or whatever he did in his spare time.
And then, well, then Roazen gave us the next text to read.
Doestoevski's 'The Underground Man'.
(I'd never heard of it. First thing I thought of was that old Gary Coleman t.v. movie. You ever see that one? On the right track, I think it was called. The one where he played this shoeshine boy in the New York City subway system who had never, I mean never, been above-ground, on the street, amongst the people. Not even for a hot-dog or a ball game. Lived in a coin-locker, he did. Can you believe that? And I saw that when I was very young and very impressed, him being Gary Coleman, and all. I mean, c'mon -- this was Arnold from Different Strokes. And here he was living underground. And at the end of the movie, he actually walked up the steps, up, towards the light, the light of the street, of day, of out there, and I remember that very clearly, watching that ending with my brother on the small t.v. in the family room of our old house on Bayshore Crescent, and what a wonderful feeling that was, triumphant, really, to see little Gary rise, conquer his fears and go up, and if you laugh or scoff at my emotions towards an early-eighties Gary Coleman flick, go ahead, be my guest, but I guess that means that you have never been young, or you've forgotten what it was like, forgotten how glorious such a piece of art can be, forgotten what it's like to be moved so powerfully, so forcefully, so much at so young an age.)
The exact specifics of the narrative escape me, but the 'underground man' was a depressed, lonely creature who haunted the streets of, what was it, Moscow, maybe? Disconnected from society. Distrustful of fellow man. Alone.
"Yes, yes, yes," Roazen argued. "Man is good, man is rational, man is proper. But what about this quote from Doestoevski's hero?"
Sometimes it's fun to smash things.
Again:
Sometimes it's fun to smash things.
The truth of that floored me. The undeniability of that wiped me clean. He was right. Sometimes it is fun to smash things. How does Mill explain that?
I realized that they had designed this course to screw with my head. They had succeeded.
And the rest of the semester was a fascinating examination of how indiviual psychological inclinations affected the course of large-scale political systems. They started by introducing conventional outlines (a la Mill) of how society should and will be run, and then they introduced, Roazen and his teaching assistants did, an element of darkness, savagery, even malice into the equation. How can these two streams co-exist?
We'd go to the lecture twice a week and then go for a smaller tutorial group to discuss what Roazen had talked about.
Much talk was about the nihilistic 'underground man'. I remember my t.a., a long, grey-haired dude in his late thirties, saying: "There is no such thing as a nihilist, because a true nihilist would kill himself."
Hmmm, I thought. I think I wanted to ask: Um, could you explain 'nihilism' again? But I didn't.
This was the same t.a. who stated: "When Marx died, he was not a Marxist. I repeat: When Marx died, he was not a Marxist." I remember realizing that this was supposed to be impor-tant and momentous, what he was saying. I nodded. We all nodded, the other students and me. The tone was very solemn. The t.a. let the silence build, crest, disappear. I think I wanted to ask: Um, could you explain 'marxism' again? But I didn't.
(What do you want? I was eighteen. And, um, come to think of it, if you do understand Marxism, drop me a line, will ya?)
The point is (and I do have one, or I did, or I've forgotten it, but it's here somewhere) that a lot of what university is good for is introducing young minds to concepts they have not encountered or considered before.
It's good to learn about nihilism. It's good to learn about the dark side of man. It's good to ponder that. Art, the best art, concerns itself with the dark, inevitable downslide of human existence. We are doomed, the best art says. It recognizes the fallibility of man, and the inevi-
tability of that fall. That's what makes drama, drama -- the conflict of our futile strivings.
But in the real world, in life, outside of the movie theater and the lecture hall, away from the world of the novel, such thinking leads...nowhere. Nothing can be built on nothing.
And I think Western culture has created a kind of negative vortex centred around the denigration of possibility and the triumph of cynicism, where all sincere, guided, directed effort can be deemed passe and, even worse, naive.
The great danger is that nihilism can seem to be viable amonst young people.
Why bother to stop AIDS in Africa, we ask. What's the point, we wonder. Do-gooders be damned. Best to wallow in our own negativity and refuse to begin.
But there are people out there who are emerging from the underground. Who are seeking a better way for their fellow man. Yes, yes, as the shoddiness of most of the world attests to -- sometimes it is, it is fun to smash things. Students need to be taught that. They need to know that their negative, destructive impulses are not unnatual, no, not all -- they're human. But you remember Animal House? Remember Tom Hulce, trying to decide whether or not to sleep with the teenage chick, and there's a devil and an angel on each shoulder, whispering in his ear? That's our education, giving us the good and the bad of life. Kids have to know about that. Need to know about that.
To give, extend and embrace those sentiments, though, out in the real world, to use the root of those dark and dangerous feelings as a philosophy and an approach towards life, can lead only to spiritual and moral bankruptcy.
It can only lead down.
In another class, 'Good and Evil', I learned about Plato and the cave. We're all in the cave, unsure of the world beyond. We all have faulty perceptions. We're all misguided. We all acknowledge the evil that men do.
But my hero as a kid sure as hell wasn't Plato, and I learned a similar lesson early on.
Let's call it The Gary Coleman Doctrine, shall we?
You're either Gary Coleman living in the subway, refusing to go up, comfortable in the darkness. Or you can take the leap and walk the steps and see what's up there, in the light, while everybody else stays down below, in the cold, comfortable in their complacency as they watch and listen to the trains go by, carrying people to and from work, all day long. While they sit, and suffer, and revel in their misery.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
The latest issue of Time-Asia features a cover story concerning the decades-(centuries?) long animosity between China and Japan, and today (or last night, for you North Americaners) Bush visited Canada -- both the magazine article and the diplomatic trip reminders that, let's say it together now, everyone hates their neighbours.
It's true. I never realized this until I moved to Japan, but nobody likes the guy next door. I thought Canadians had a monopoly on disliking their neighbours to the south (or north, or east, or west, depending on the country) but we don't. Japan, China, South Korea, North Korea, Thailand Cambodia -- before I entered Asia, all of these countries were the same to me, one big indistinguishable glop, which says something either about the Canadian educational system or my own lack of interest in the area. (Or maybe both.)
Once I stepped foot on Nipponese soil, though, and started to read the newspaper, and listen to students, and dig through the history texts, I realized that Canadians were not alone in heaping scorn on their neighbours; the Japanese do it to the Chinese and the Koreans, and vice versa. And then I moved to lovely, scenic Cambodia, and realized that the Cambodians don't like the Thais or the Vietnamese much, and the feeling's pretty much mutual on all sides. (Wars tend to create a little bit of angst.)
Do the reasons even matter? They bridge culture, these reasons do, encompassing the usual potent blend of jealousy and domination. The small countries hate the big countries; the big countries pretend to be pretty much indifferent.
I don't know whether it's somewhat scary or relatively reassuring that the tensions (however mild) that exist between Canada and America are replicated halfway around the world. It means that everybody's the same, that all nations harbor similar skepticism and weariness directed towards the countries that line their borders.
After all, Cambodia and Thailand and Vietnam, and China and Japan and Korea, have all had, what, centuries, if not millenia, to hone and sharpen their blades of hatred.
Canada and the States have only been at this national-resentment thing for a mere two hundred years or so. (Not that America particularly thinks one way or another about Canada, I think, but hey -- the States is a young country. Give it time. Canada might tick it off big-time just yet. We're slow-starters, us Canucks, but once we get going, watch out -- we might just, like, slap you or something. Maybe even twice. On both cheeks.) There's still plenty of time to develop the whole disgust-bordering-on-hatred gig that is so common in Asia.
And still time to realize that we're all in this baby together. If you're the Jeffersons, and you live next to that bigot Archie Bunker, you can always move it on up to the big time, to that castle in the sky. Unless Mars comes knockin', we're all stuck on this blue orb. Might as well invite the neighbours over for a glass of cool lemonade, some cookies, a game of pool and a DVD.
Who says three thousand years of tensions can't be solved in a century or two?
It's true. I never realized this until I moved to Japan, but nobody likes the guy next door. I thought Canadians had a monopoly on disliking their neighbours to the south (or north, or east, or west, depending on the country) but we don't. Japan, China, South Korea, North Korea, Thailand Cambodia -- before I entered Asia, all of these countries were the same to me, one big indistinguishable glop, which says something either about the Canadian educational system or my own lack of interest in the area. (Or maybe both.)
Once I stepped foot on Nipponese soil, though, and started to read the newspaper, and listen to students, and dig through the history texts, I realized that Canadians were not alone in heaping scorn on their neighbours; the Japanese do it to the Chinese and the Koreans, and vice versa. And then I moved to lovely, scenic Cambodia, and realized that the Cambodians don't like the Thais or the Vietnamese much, and the feeling's pretty much mutual on all sides. (Wars tend to create a little bit of angst.)
Do the reasons even matter? They bridge culture, these reasons do, encompassing the usual potent blend of jealousy and domination. The small countries hate the big countries; the big countries pretend to be pretty much indifferent.
I don't know whether it's somewhat scary or relatively reassuring that the tensions (however mild) that exist between Canada and America are replicated halfway around the world. It means that everybody's the same, that all nations harbor similar skepticism and weariness directed towards the countries that line their borders.
After all, Cambodia and Thailand and Vietnam, and China and Japan and Korea, have all had, what, centuries, if not millenia, to hone and sharpen their blades of hatred.
Canada and the States have only been at this national-resentment thing for a mere two hundred years or so. (Not that America particularly thinks one way or another about Canada, I think, but hey -- the States is a young country. Give it time. Canada might tick it off big-time just yet. We're slow-starters, us Canucks, but once we get going, watch out -- we might just, like, slap you or something. Maybe even twice. On both cheeks.) There's still plenty of time to develop the whole disgust-bordering-on-hatred gig that is so common in Asia.
And still time to realize that we're all in this baby together. If you're the Jeffersons, and you live next to that bigot Archie Bunker, you can always move it on up to the big time, to that castle in the sky. Unless Mars comes knockin', we're all stuck on this blue orb. Might as well invite the neighbours over for a glass of cool lemonade, some cookies, a game of pool and a DVD.
Who says three thousand years of tensions can't be solved in a century or two?
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
PHNOM PENH AT FIVE, AND THE ABSENCE OF SHATNER
Pop quiz:
I mention Baghdad -- what images pop into your head?
Or how about Moscow?
Hanoi?
Philadelphia?
Phnom Penh?
We all have mental images imprinted into our psyche from who-knows-where 0f places that we've never been to, cities that we've never stepped foot in, oceans that we've never crossed. A lifetime of t.v. and movies and even books have allowed us to create our own, personal storehouse of locations within our mind that probably bear little, if any, comparison to the actual locales that exist independent of our own perceptions of them.
Take Phnom Penh.
More specifically, Phnom Penh at five a.m. on a typical Monday morning. (Then again, is any morning really typical?)
If you had asked me two, three years ago to close my eyes and slow down my breathing and get all contemplative and stuff and imagine Phnom Penh at sunrise, I would have imagined, well, not much at all. Dark streets, probably. Mounds of garbage lining the roads, definitely. Run-down, decrepit buildings having their grimy exteriors illuminated even more by the gradually fading moonlight.
Certainly the streets would have been empty in my vision. Who would possibly be out at five a.m. in a city as a dangerous and notorious as Phnom Penh?
Ah, but I have learned certain lessons in the past few years, and most of them have to do with preconceptions. They have do with judging before experiencing. And if you have not experienced Phnom Penh at five a.m., especially down by the river, then you have missed something fascinating.
What's Phnom Penh like on the banks of the river at five a.m. on a Monday morning?
Crowded, is what it's like. Dozens, hundreds of people doing their exercises, walking in place, walking around, running around, dancing in groups to music pumping from ghetto blasters. You will see couples and families and damged people with twisted legs holding out scales for you to step on, calling out the price, five hundred riel only sir, sir, a good price, mister, a cheap price, just for you my, my friend. You will see the darkness give way to an orange and gentle sun that will soon, very soon, become merciless.
At five a.m., though, it is gentle, this sun, and the air is cool, and the streets, which are emptied out after midnight, which no one in their right mind would wander around after twelve a.m., are full. The streets have been reclaimed from the night and given over to the day. No more fear. No more locked doors. No more sideways glances to the motodopes over your shoulders.
At this time, you see, these streets pulse.
That's Phnom Penh, by the river, at five a.m.
Moscow at five a.m.?
Don't know.
Never been there.
************************************************************************************
There was a recent program by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (or the CBC, kind of like Japan's NHK or America's PBS, only without those annoying pledge breaks every twenty minutes) that sought to establish once and for all (or at least for this year) who the 'greatest Canadian' was. I thought it was kind of a silly idea, and still think it's kind of a silly idea, but the results are interesting. Scary, but interesting.
The winner was Tommy Douglas, the creater of universal health care in Canada. Which shows you how important this issue is for Canada. (He is also, incidentally, Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather, Kiefer being the daughter of actress Shirley Douglas, but I don't think that's why Tommy was voted number one. I mean, Canadians like Kiefer Sutherland, don't get me wrong, very cool in Young Guns II and Flatliners, especially, but we don't like him enough to vote his grandfather the greatest Canadian ever.) Given that David Suzuki, the environmentalist writer/t.v. host was also on the list, it's a telling sign of how much weight we give social, humanitarian issues, us Canadians. We do have standards, you know.
At least, I think we do.
But check out the rest of the list.
Because Don Cherry also placed in the top ten. Cherry is a hockey commentator who is always putting his foot in his mouth and insulting Quebeckers or Europeans and he is highly entertain-ing and watchable. A lot of people don't like him. I do. Apparently, a lot of other Canadians do, too.
Is he one of the greatest Canadians ever?
Hmmm...
Even more disturbing, he placed ahead of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever, John A.Macdonald, our first prime minister, and Alexander Graham Bell, who only invented the, oh, what do you call it, um, oh yeah, the freakin' telephone.
I mean, come ooooonnnnnnn...
It's kind of like Rush Limbaugh placing ahead of Michael Jordan, George Washington and, I dunno, Benjamin Franklin. (Didn't he invent electricity? Or discover it or something?)
A hockey commentator placing ahead of a hockey player? Gretzky is god in Canada. And John A.Macdonald is on our money. (Then again, so are kids playing hockey, true, but they're playing it, at least -- not commenting on it. And they're not wearing outlandish ties. And this is on the back of the five dollar bill, the blue one, and I saw Mike Myers when Late Night with Conan O'Brien came to Toronto, and he called it a 'Spock five', and I didn't know what he meant, but then he took out a magic marker and drew some black hair and pointed ears on a giant blow-up version of John A.Macdonald on the five dollar bill, and, lo and behold, he was right -- he does look like Star Trek's Mr.Spock. But I digress...) And did I mention that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? (Although Joe Mantegna as Joey Zaza in The Godfather III says that the Italian, Marconi, invented it before Bell -- but what do mafioso know anyways, right?)
I know I know; it's a silly poll to begin with. But I'm still surprised that Pierre Trudeau or Gretzky didn't win.
And I think Canadians need to raise their standards a bit.
After all, where the heck is Montreal and McGill University's own William Shatner?
Don't we know anything?
I mention Baghdad -- what images pop into your head?
Or how about Moscow?
Hanoi?
Philadelphia?
Phnom Penh?
We all have mental images imprinted into our psyche from who-knows-where 0f places that we've never been to, cities that we've never stepped foot in, oceans that we've never crossed. A lifetime of t.v. and movies and even books have allowed us to create our own, personal storehouse of locations within our mind that probably bear little, if any, comparison to the actual locales that exist independent of our own perceptions of them.
Take Phnom Penh.
More specifically, Phnom Penh at five a.m. on a typical Monday morning. (Then again, is any morning really typical?)
If you had asked me two, three years ago to close my eyes and slow down my breathing and get all contemplative and stuff and imagine Phnom Penh at sunrise, I would have imagined, well, not much at all. Dark streets, probably. Mounds of garbage lining the roads, definitely. Run-down, decrepit buildings having their grimy exteriors illuminated even more by the gradually fading moonlight.
Certainly the streets would have been empty in my vision. Who would possibly be out at five a.m. in a city as a dangerous and notorious as Phnom Penh?
Ah, but I have learned certain lessons in the past few years, and most of them have to do with preconceptions. They have do with judging before experiencing. And if you have not experienced Phnom Penh at five a.m., especially down by the river, then you have missed something fascinating.
What's Phnom Penh like on the banks of the river at five a.m. on a Monday morning?
Crowded, is what it's like. Dozens, hundreds of people doing their exercises, walking in place, walking around, running around, dancing in groups to music pumping from ghetto blasters. You will see couples and families and damged people with twisted legs holding out scales for you to step on, calling out the price, five hundred riel only sir, sir, a good price, mister, a cheap price, just for you my, my friend. You will see the darkness give way to an orange and gentle sun that will soon, very soon, become merciless.
At five a.m., though, it is gentle, this sun, and the air is cool, and the streets, which are emptied out after midnight, which no one in their right mind would wander around after twelve a.m., are full. The streets have been reclaimed from the night and given over to the day. No more fear. No more locked doors. No more sideways glances to the motodopes over your shoulders.
At this time, you see, these streets pulse.
That's Phnom Penh, by the river, at five a.m.
Moscow at five a.m.?
Don't know.
Never been there.
************************************************************************************
There was a recent program by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (or the CBC, kind of like Japan's NHK or America's PBS, only without those annoying pledge breaks every twenty minutes) that sought to establish once and for all (or at least for this year) who the 'greatest Canadian' was. I thought it was kind of a silly idea, and still think it's kind of a silly idea, but the results are interesting. Scary, but interesting.
The winner was Tommy Douglas, the creater of universal health care in Canada. Which shows you how important this issue is for Canada. (He is also, incidentally, Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather, Kiefer being the daughter of actress Shirley Douglas, but I don't think that's why Tommy was voted number one. I mean, Canadians like Kiefer Sutherland, don't get me wrong, very cool in Young Guns II and Flatliners, especially, but we don't like him enough to vote his grandfather the greatest Canadian ever.) Given that David Suzuki, the environmentalist writer/t.v. host was also on the list, it's a telling sign of how much weight we give social, humanitarian issues, us Canadians. We do have standards, you know.
At least, I think we do.
But check out the rest of the list.
Because Don Cherry also placed in the top ten. Cherry is a hockey commentator who is always putting his foot in his mouth and insulting Quebeckers or Europeans and he is highly entertain-ing and watchable. A lot of people don't like him. I do. Apparently, a lot of other Canadians do, too.
Is he one of the greatest Canadians ever?
Hmmm...
Even more disturbing, he placed ahead of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever, John A.Macdonald, our first prime minister, and Alexander Graham Bell, who only invented the, oh, what do you call it, um, oh yeah, the freakin' telephone.
I mean, come ooooonnnnnnn...
It's kind of like Rush Limbaugh placing ahead of Michael Jordan, George Washington and, I dunno, Benjamin Franklin. (Didn't he invent electricity? Or discover it or something?)
A hockey commentator placing ahead of a hockey player? Gretzky is god in Canada. And John A.Macdonald is on our money. (Then again, so are kids playing hockey, true, but they're playing it, at least -- not commenting on it. And they're not wearing outlandish ties. And this is on the back of the five dollar bill, the blue one, and I saw Mike Myers when Late Night with Conan O'Brien came to Toronto, and he called it a 'Spock five', and I didn't know what he meant, but then he took out a magic marker and drew some black hair and pointed ears on a giant blow-up version of John A.Macdonald on the five dollar bill, and, lo and behold, he was right -- he does look like Star Trek's Mr.Spock. But I digress...) And did I mention that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? (Although Joe Mantegna as Joey Zaza in The Godfather III says that the Italian, Marconi, invented it before Bell -- but what do mafioso know anyways, right?)
I know I know; it's a silly poll to begin with. But I'm still surprised that Pierre Trudeau or Gretzky didn't win.
And I think Canadians need to raise their standards a bit.
After all, where the heck is Montreal and McGill University's own William Shatner?
Don't we know anything?
Monday, November 29, 2004
TO FAIL IS DIVINE...
...failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
-- Ian Buruma,
Wages of Guilt
Long live failure!
Right now, critics around the world are trouncing Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER, a film I'm dying to see, with their linguistic weapons of war. (Well, not all critics -- Harry Knowles of www.aintitcoolnews.com and Armond White of www.nypress.com have championed the film, but they're in the minority.) Overlong, garish, ludicrous, filled with bad acting and an implausible tale -- in other words, a typical Oliver Stone flick.
That's what they say. I've long been an Oliver Stone fanatic; that particular obsession will have to wait for another, epic-length blog. Let's just say that the rampant, galactic-wide dismissal of the film saddens me.
Not because of the film itself. Hell, maybe it is a mess. Who knows? I'll decide when I see it, whether it's on DVD here or in a theatre somewhere else in the world. The moment you start allowing critics to dictate your entertainment options is the moment you have, officially, given up all vestige of independent thinking. Epic or epic-yawn, I'll watch the flick.
Why?
Ah, because to fail in a noble quest is better than succeeding at a mediocre one. There is great, worthy respect due to someone who has bitten off more than they can chew. And what a sight to behold, to pay homage to! How ennobling to see effort spent -- misplaced, perhaps, misguided, to be sure, but spent, nonetheless. Exerted and unleashed effort, regardless of the outcome, is always inspiring.
George Lucas once said that he spent two years thinking about a movie while a critic spent twenty minutes writing and thinking about it. (And all of you jesters out there up in the balcony who are thinking that twenty minutes is too long to spend thinking about a George Lucas flick can exit now. Watch your step on the way out.)
Think about it. Think about what it takes to write a script about Alexander the Great. Think about what it would take to cast it, shoot it, edit it. You know what it takes? Passion and balls.
What does it take to write a review? A piece of paper and a pen. A computer and a keyboard. (Or an, um, blog...) This does not mean that a review cannot also be a noble piece of work. But too many critics take a perverse glee in cutting others down to size. To use your art for those principal aims is small, petty, demeaning.
We are here on this planet to do grand things or fail miserably trying. That's what I believe.
Clive Barker, the horror writer, was asked how he would like to be remembered. "As a failure," he said. Why? Because that means that he had not reached his ultimate goal. Because that means he sought to do something beyond his grasp and did not quite attain it. Because that meant he was striving.
Ah, to strive. To strive, friends and neighbours, Romans and countrymen.
You don't learn from success. You learn from striving, failing, falling short. In the last few years I've failed quite a bit. I trained for a marathon in Japan, only to blow out my knee in the week before the race. Couldn't run it. I took Level Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Didn't pass it.
But as every true warrior knows, even the losses are battles. To fail while attempting something above and beyond yourself is proof of your appetite for life. If every attempt is to be met by ridicule from the weak, the cowardly, the meek, than what does say of us, the human race? What does it say to the young? It says that we make ourselves bigger by putting down and ridiculing those who try and achieve something, that's what it says, and that doesn't say much about us at all, in the end.
So let's make a toast to Oliver Stone, shall we? Maybe the film is riveting, or maybe the film will make you want to eat rivets, but let's salute the foolish, the mad, the bold quest of a man who dared to bring Alexander's impossible life to the silver screen. Let's raise a glass to the last-place runner of the race, the goalie pulled after five goals in ten minutes, the employee sacked after a week on the job.
And I can say, with all honesty, that, should success elude you, I wish you a long life full of failure. I wish you scorn from critics, be they family or friends or, well, critics. I wish you a horse to fall off of in battle. And another to hop back on.
-- Ian Buruma,
Wages of Guilt
Long live failure!
Right now, critics around the world are trouncing Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER, a film I'm dying to see, with their linguistic weapons of war. (Well, not all critics -- Harry Knowles of www.aintitcoolnews.com and Armond White of www.nypress.com have championed the film, but they're in the minority.) Overlong, garish, ludicrous, filled with bad acting and an implausible tale -- in other words, a typical Oliver Stone flick.
That's what they say. I've long been an Oliver Stone fanatic; that particular obsession will have to wait for another, epic-length blog. Let's just say that the rampant, galactic-wide dismissal of the film saddens me.
Not because of the film itself. Hell, maybe it is a mess. Who knows? I'll decide when I see it, whether it's on DVD here or in a theatre somewhere else in the world. The moment you start allowing critics to dictate your entertainment options is the moment you have, officially, given up all vestige of independent thinking. Epic or epic-yawn, I'll watch the flick.
Why?
Ah, because to fail in a noble quest is better than succeeding at a mediocre one. There is great, worthy respect due to someone who has bitten off more than they can chew. And what a sight to behold, to pay homage to! How ennobling to see effort spent -- misplaced, perhaps, misguided, to be sure, but spent, nonetheless. Exerted and unleashed effort, regardless of the outcome, is always inspiring.
George Lucas once said that he spent two years thinking about a movie while a critic spent twenty minutes writing and thinking about it. (And all of you jesters out there up in the balcony who are thinking that twenty minutes is too long to spend thinking about a George Lucas flick can exit now. Watch your step on the way out.)
Think about it. Think about what it takes to write a script about Alexander the Great. Think about what it would take to cast it, shoot it, edit it. You know what it takes? Passion and balls.
What does it take to write a review? A piece of paper and a pen. A computer and a keyboard. (Or an, um, blog...) This does not mean that a review cannot also be a noble piece of work. But too many critics take a perverse glee in cutting others down to size. To use your art for those principal aims is small, petty, demeaning.
We are here on this planet to do grand things or fail miserably trying. That's what I believe.
Clive Barker, the horror writer, was asked how he would like to be remembered. "As a failure," he said. Why? Because that means that he had not reached his ultimate goal. Because that means he sought to do something beyond his grasp and did not quite attain it. Because that meant he was striving.
Ah, to strive. To strive, friends and neighbours, Romans and countrymen.
You don't learn from success. You learn from striving, failing, falling short. In the last few years I've failed quite a bit. I trained for a marathon in Japan, only to blow out my knee in the week before the race. Couldn't run it. I took Level Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Didn't pass it.
But as every true warrior knows, even the losses are battles. To fail while attempting something above and beyond yourself is proof of your appetite for life. If every attempt is to be met by ridicule from the weak, the cowardly, the meek, than what does say of us, the human race? What does it say to the young? It says that we make ourselves bigger by putting down and ridiculing those who try and achieve something, that's what it says, and that doesn't say much about us at all, in the end.
So let's make a toast to Oliver Stone, shall we? Maybe the film is riveting, or maybe the film will make you want to eat rivets, but let's salute the foolish, the mad, the bold quest of a man who dared to bring Alexander's impossible life to the silver screen. Let's raise a glass to the last-place runner of the race, the goalie pulled after five goals in ten minutes, the employee sacked after a week on the job.
And I can say, with all honesty, that, should success elude you, I wish you a long life full of failure. I wish you scorn from critics, be they family or friends or, well, critics. I wish you a horse to fall off of in battle. And another to hop back on.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
THE SOROS DOCTRINE
George Soros is the billionaire Hunagrian-Jewish-American who spent millions of dollars in trying to defeat Bush, but he's also quite a remarkable philanthropist, a man who didn't start giving away his money into he was well into his sixties. For many years he had been interested in philosphy, even writing his own books on the subject, but after a certain point in time he came to realize that the real self, his true self, was, indeed, a philosophical, contemplative one -- but it wasn't enough. All of that thinking and pondering had created a vacuum, he said, and by doing he escaped from the vacuum and into the realm of the actual. (Or something along those lines.)
Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.
I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.
I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)
But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?
And yet...
At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.
A few points she made that I remember.
1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.
Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.
What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.
Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.
But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.
No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.
And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)
This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.
But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.
2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.
We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.
Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.
Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.
And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.
So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.
These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.
These are the ones to ask.
These are the ones you listen to, carefully.
Before they go.
*************************************************************************************
I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)
You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)
Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.
I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.
I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)
But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?
And yet...
At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.
A few points she made that I remember.
1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.
Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.
What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.
Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.
But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.
No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.
And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)
This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.
But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.
2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.
We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.
Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.
Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.
And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.
So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.
These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.
These are the ones to ask.
These are the ones you listen to, carefully.
Before they go.
*************************************************************************************
I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)
You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
WHY I LIKE COMMAS
There's this one scene in the Richard Price novel FREEDOMLAND where there's a mob or a protest or something in an apartment somewhere in Jersey, and the person in charge is either trying to control the crowd or scare the crowd, cupping his hands in front of his mouth to amplify the sound, and he starts saying something like: "The police, are on, the way. You have, to stay, calm." And that replicated so perfectly the way that people talk in those situations when you have a lot of loud people saying a lot of things and you want to be heard, have to be heard: the staggered, staccato monotone, the jagged breakdown of a sentence into easily heard and identifable parts, and I'd never seen it put in print like that, and I thought cool, which is why I've remembered the style, if not the exact wording, of it even five years after reading the book (which you should read, by the way.)
THE COSBY DOCTRINE
I read a transcript of LARRY KING LIVE the other day (because, uh, that's what guys like me do in their spare time, when they can never figure out when the suspender- guy's show is on over here), the one where he was interviewing the author of the second most bestselling non-fiction book in NEW YORK TIMES history, a self-help book called THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. (And if you don't know what that book is, then you don't exist in the same universe as all of those folks that voted for Bush do.) He's a pastor named Rick Warren, I think, and he said some things that reminded me of a Buddhist expression I heard somewhere:
Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.
This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.
That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)
We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.
I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.
Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.
Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.
This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.
There's more to life than life itself.
(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)
We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)
Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.
This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.
That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)
We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.
I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.
Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.
Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.
This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.
There's more to life than life itself.
(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)
We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)
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