Working it out

It occurred to me on my way home from my Curves gym that no-one was going to pick up the reference in the earlier post about Art Linkletter's tv show, Kids Say the Darndest Things.  I probably dated myself--a sort of innocuous faux pas, I thought...until I got home to find an email from someone apparently not willing to comment here, saying that my posts were "pretentious pieces of crap."  Well, my writing has been called worse.  After all, we can't all be Margaret Atwood.  On the other hand, I could have written a much more scathing critique than he did, "crap" not really being a strong descriptor of anything at all. For example, I would have said that my blog was no more than a "bog of pretentious discourses written by a jaded and somewhat cynical mind."  Or:  "a pedantic, self-important series of musings which, despite the fine language, prove to be pedestrian and boring."  (I especially like the "pedestrian" part.)  And there's the rub.  I love language.  Always have...ever since I was a little girl and would read the dictionary for pleasure.  Using words to express yourself as efficiently as language allows doesn't harbour a slight to others who choose, um, less efficient words to convey whatever is loitering around in their heads.  In fact, you'd think it would have the opposite effect.  Just before my ex and I split, he thanked me.  "What for?" I said.  "For teaching me to talk better," he replied.  I'm not sure how I did that except that I was certainly the more verbal of the two of us.  And, certainly, after he'd spent most of my money and went on to spend most of his mother's money (I've since heard), I can't say that I thought it was all that great a compliment.  I would have preferred keeping my money. 

Horses say the darndest things

Anthropomorphism is the ultimate narcissism, the manifest symptom of species-privilege.  We are too egocentric to conceive of, decipher, or imagine the inner lives, social and communication needs of other species. So, to ascribe human speech and behaviour to animals is to pander to man's utter inability to get past his limited, binary thinking, to get over himself; to somehow show that our interiority is not the only experience available.  It becomes a bit of a tautology, I know.  That pig may be singing to the moon or he may be doing something totally beyond our ken.  Hard to say.  As Jane Austen once wrote:  "second-hand conjecture is pitiful".
It is a failure of imagination to resort to anthropomorphism to explain or explain away animal life:  a sorry reductionism to justify why their lives are less valuable than ours or equally valuable.  I would resent having had to resort to such a conceit to accommodate the solopsism of man except for the pleasure I took in writing the horses' dialogues.  Still and all, language is as callow as we are, and further restricted when framed by the demands of storytelling, stimulating pity and fear and all that jazz.  So that failure of the imagination is, perforce, mine as well.  Just ask Babe.

Oscar winner, The Cove

I'm excessively tired just now, but I have to say a few words about "The Cove", which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2010.  The direction is so exemplary--it's a thriller.  A thriller about Japan's decimation of dolphins without the approval of the Japanese people.  It features a perfect mix of a very human story about a man who changed his mind:  a dolphin trainer (the trainer of Flipper) who has an epiphany, almost overnight, and launches an immediate (like, the next day) crusade to save dolphins from the selfish and savage vagaries of man (well, vagaries may be too soft a word).  The doc follows him and the recruitment of the producer/director (I forget his name) who, along with others (like Sea Shepherd, and Surfers for Cetaceans), attempt to film the "killing cove"--an out-of-sight, remote cove on the Taiji Island of Japan where 23,000 dolphins a year are separated from their young (remember, they're mammals like us), and speared repeatedly until the cove waters run red with their blood. The International Whaling Commission is shown to be ineffectual in stopping Japan from this annual savage slaughter whose gain goes to dolphin shows and zoos--like SeaWorld and the like, which we, Westerners, pay to enjoy, unaware of, or indifferent to, whether the dolphins amusing us are content, healthy or adapted to what is clearly not their natural environment.  The most recent newsletter of the Sea Shepherd features their presence in Taiji, and I'll have a direct website addy for you shortly.  In the meantime, if "The Cove" is showing on TV or anywhere else in your neighbourhood, make a point of seeing it.  I guarantee it's got more action than "Lethal Weapon" and the screaming of the dolphins being sloppily and randomly speared will stay with you...through the night.

'All is Vanity,' saith the Bishop

That's the title of a poem by Robert Browning.  If I recall correctly, he meant 'vanity' in the sense of "efforts made in vain", "the futility of it all" etc.  But it also speaks to self-importance, as in "a vain person"--and not just one who is vain about his appearance, but also about virtually everything he says or does.  Which brings me to my very recent decision to have my novel published by a vanity press--and a big one, at that.  However good or bad my novel is, I have to strike while the iron is hot:  vide the release of Disney's Secretariat and the forthcoming Saving our Nation's Horses.  If I stubbornly persist in going the traditional way (which is partly why it took me so long to write my Master's thesis), I'll lose the timeliness of the subject. Xlibris can get it out there, in many formats, probably by February, or Christmas at the earliest.  The price is equal to what I've spent on friends (one of whom is still paying me back after five years), or two-months' worth of keeping up with the house costs or the start-up cost of my ex-husband's business.
I know the book is flawed:  it's far too short and harbours all the tics associated with a first novel.  But I have to start somewhere. 

That Parrot is Asleep

The puerile but concise rant of the postee mentioned earlier--full of a venomous smugness--is in stark contrast to the man who showed up at the Massueville demonstration last Monday.  As luck would have it, this poor sap showed up amongst the demonstrators--some sporting fake bullet holes in their foreheads (I guess he didn't notice as he pulled in to park beside them)--with the intention of asking the abattoir to slaughter his young stallion for him.  As I shepherded him over to the group (he didn't notice the big signs they were holding up with "arretons l'abattage des chevaux" written on them either), he told me the abattoir would pay him $350 (figure 35 cents per pound).  So it was that when at least five of us pressed in on him, all talking at once and in two languages, he was taken aback, as if he'd opened the door to what he thought was a room and found himself on the edge of a cliff instead.  (Well, one can never safely predict one's destination with any certainty at the best of times.)  I'll give him credit though; he didn't turn and leave (run away! run away!):  he stayed as the group grew more vocal, imploring him not to do this heinous thing, inundating him with facts and proof and alternatives.  Now nonplussed, he argued back that no cruelty existed at the slaughterhouse.  That wasn't true, he knew for sure.  They shot the horse dead right in front of him last time because he'd told them he didn't want it to suffer.  I nearly wiped a tear from my eye. I suggested they might have done that because he was a witness, and judging from the paucity of windows in the building, they didn't really want witnesses to their daily goings-on.  Furthermore, I asked if he thought they had the time to process 80 or so horses a day in that kind fashion--would that be an efficient way to render a high volume of product?  When he looked back at me blankly, I thought maybe I'd driven the point home to him and that he was processing new information or maybe, old information in a new way.  But no.  The stallion had an undropped testicle and couldn't be used for breeding...no, it wasn't that...the operation was too expensive...no, actually, the vets said he was inoperable...anyway, he'd heard about those horse sanctuaries and they weren't on the up-and-up...they would mistreat, sell, abuse his stallion and he wouldn't have that.  He was fond of his horse. Horse-owning demonstrators explained to him that none of what he was saying or had been told or suspected was true.  It wasn't so amazing to me that he refused to take the money quickly rustled up by the group to buy the stallion from him.  What amazed me was that in the face of incontrovertible facts, he, in the end, did drive off, mumbling something that didn't sound overly complimentary.  That's where this man and the bute-loving postee meet, their incorrigibility exactly the same, only the styles differing.  It makes me think of the classic Python sketch about the, um, sleeping parrot.  Stupidity, after all, is the unwillingness to learn.  I bet even the dead parrot knew that.

They Shoot Horses, don't they?

A few hours ago, I returned from...bowling.  Yes, you read right:  bowling.  To a second-wave feminist, an activist, a boomer who was going to change the world (again)--the type who threw linen over the lampshade and thought Pier 66 wicker was boss--the very idea of bowling was anathema.  Imagine renting used shoes--yes, wearing footwear probably full of fungi and other contractable foot disorders--to participate in a game once imaged in full crinoline skirts and innocuous suburban flirting, slinging a small ball against pins shaped like old coke bottles.  JMJ...preserve me! Eww!  Well...I had a blast!  Extremely friendly people, from all walks of life; of all ages; some extremely gifted at targeting even a single coke bottle standing in a remote corner, and others no better--and sometimes worse--than I was, just having fun, canoodling for seconds at a time, pressing the flesh with high-five's (with nary a worry about germs, not an antibacterial in sight), and enjoying a two-hour reprieve from daily life and its many burdens.  Even five years ago, if you'd told me I'd be bowling, I'd have laughed (ha!HAH!) in your face.  But the foreshadowing was receiving a gift sub to Reader's Digest about five years ago. The woman who subbed to Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Cosmopolitan now kept Reader's Digest in the, um, restroom just as a, shall we say, quick and dirty read. 
A very serious academic once told me that there was no shame in suburban living or its lifestyle.  He said that "people like us" could change and help evolve the suburban lifestyle to make it into something else...something more cultural, socially active...bringing a consciousness to it which would alter it forever, make it into something else altogether.  I thought he was a self-important snob at the time, but at the time, I also thought he had a point.  If...IF it could be done at all, I thought.  Yet after all, haven't all the changes brought forward in the past 30 years been grassroots movements?  Was Rosa Parks an academic or an activist--or Friedan?  No, Parks was someone who took the bus everyday, and the other was a housewife (and Nelly, well, Nelly was a woman who had a point to make). The women's rights and black american rights movements began not in some rarefied, Ivory Tower environment, but rather, right on the ground, here among us plebes.  Even our obsession today with green, environmentally conscious living--didn't that begin with commoners (the so-called unwashed masses) accessing, learning and being revolted by practices that put the planet we live on in harm's way?  It's always been about degrees of information, which, once sifted rationally, leads to a folk wisdom which then grows, aggrandizes into a global value system which next becomes the cutting edge of culture.  And of course, with the internet and social media, this level of the socio-cultural transcends nations and national boundaries...perhaps for the first time in recorded history:  it constellates into a value based solely on global/planetary salubrity that subsumes anything prior to, or before it; it subjects national agendas to greater, more pressing overall concerns.  National prejudice becomes fatally jingoistic in the face of it.
The same can be said of individuals who persist in littering; refuse to recyle; have no idea of, and no time for, recycling or re-using; are, simply put, not interested in change per se, change which improves, change based on new information.  In short, individuals who still live (in) the culture of narcissism and are deaf, mute and blind (metaphorically speaking) to the face of reality.  One such a one posted on the CHDC (see links).  Clearly, he was attempting to bait an organisation which has as its mandate the termination of horse slaughter.  He was fishing; perhaps because it amuses him to do so; using baiting phrases like "your perverse love of these creatures" and "oddball collection of horselovers and/or vegetarians (what vegetarians have to do with it is beyond me)".  Whatever.  Horse slaughter today isn't what it might have been a few decades ago--one cannot know for sure (although in Quebec, 'l'abattage au bout de la pelle' is a dire indication); something He cannot know for sure (since he clearly hasn't researched it), except to say that it is and has been a "legitimate" food source.  It could be that he's thinking about "shooting a horse to put it out of its misery--the movie, Marnie, directed by the great Hitchcock, starring Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren (who now runs Shambala, a wild-animal refuge) comes to mind wherein the heroine, a great horse-lover, shoots her horse dead to save it suffering from a broken leg (vet care at the time understood to be less than what it is now). One isn't sure at all about what this man is thinking because none of what he says (writes) is based on anything except personal animus, and  in a mean-spirited tone to boot.  As to his final comment that he will continue to "enjoy" horseflesh, I say 'have I got recipes for you!'  Bute a l'orange.  Bute flambe. Ingest as much as you can; the lean meat harbours phenylbutazone (bute), banamine, steroids and other drugs which will make you shudder, shiver and shake with contentment. It's to die for, I tell you.  They don't shoot horses anymore, btw:  they torment them until their only reprieve is death.  Enjoy.

The Misfits

"They changed things around, dam'em," says Gable in the last movie he ever made.  Almost by default in order to be the counterpoint to the three men's lifestyle, Monroe champions the mustangs who Gable and his pals used to capture so they could be trained as riding horses, and now, as the naive Marilyn finds out, they're captured to be sold by the pound for dog food.  A really subtle touch is that, the night before, their pet dog begins to shiver.  The Gable character tries to downplay the reason, but Eli Wallach, the pilot, states it plainly:  the dog knows that they're going to be the predators, and the horses are going to be the prey.  Dogs are predators by nature but they defer to greater and bigger predators, so the dog acts like prey when he snaps at Marilyn, a well-meaning but very visible member of the predator genus.  "Things got changed around.  None of us is in charge in this world," argues Gable as he tries to explain to Monroe that he's still doing his thing; it's just that his thing--chasing and lassoing mustangs for a fee--now goes to a different and bloody end. Right up to very nearly the movie's end, though, he maintains his position by dominating the herd stallion.  "It's just that I don't want anyone making up my mind for me," he says just after he sets the stallion free. Exhausted and bloodied from his mano-a-mano with the stallion, he's realized that the means might be palatable, but the end has now become indefensible, unjustifiable.  Ya gotta like that kind of epiphany:  hard-won and self-referring.  The acting throughout the entire movie was exceptional.  Even moreso when you consider that Gable deplored Marilyn's lack of professionalism on set, often arriving late and suffering from mood swings and depression, probably complicated by an array of ill-advised prescription drugs.  Years ago, I'd read that real mustangs were wrangled for this movie:  that doesn't surprise me.  Hundreds of horses were injured or died in the making of old westerns. I've seen "The Misfits" at least seven times in my life and I still find it hard to watch, but it's a cautionary tale on so many levels--not the least of which is that when old ways of life die, stubborn stragglers and hangers-on (like Eli Wallach) are the ones who suffer, whereas those, like Gable's and Clift's characters, move on, move away, get away clear, get clear away.  In short, they skip all discovered errors and continue. That's the way of all flesh, though, ain't it?

All Laugh lines are cruelty-free (aren't they?)

I met a man at a job fair earlier this week who recognized me as a boomer straightaway. When I asked how he could tell, he skated deftly and said I exuded that self-confidence so characteristic of boomers.  Good--no, great--save! I could tell he was a seasoned people-handler, not to say people-wrangler.  It was sweet talking with someone who got my sense of humour instantly.  That doesn't happen so often that I can overlook it when it does happen.
I've been a diarist all my life, expelling the excess in my head onto the page, sometimes just to liberate some head-space but mostly just to keep myself company and legitimize (legitimate?) my numberless opinions on every subject under the sun.  Most entries are structured exegeses on what I thought at the time to be related topics.  (I was always searching for syncretism:  God knows, there must be a palette of oneness among all the dualities.  And I want to know what God knows.  Churlish of him to keep it all to himself while we slouch along, labouring with our puny understanding to grasp even an iota.)  Other entries are from the gumshoe voyageur, the one who existentializes the joy out of existence.  I still front her from time to time, although less often now.  Those entries ravel and unravel, and the splay of them is like the snake-hair of the Medusa.
So as a voluminous diarist born into a culture of narcissism, I decided it was time to blog.  I finished my novel in March of this year and, as I penned the words 'the end' in my perfect Catholic hand, I thought:  there is nothing left to say.  That's wrong, of course.  The day I write 'there is nothing more to say' is the day I release myself from this fractured, ill-begotten, foolish life and all the futile, compulsive navel-gazing that attended it. I considered having one of my characters adopt that stance but since half of them are horses, it didn't seem to fit.  The survival instincts of a horse are much too heroic. So far, the novel has been damned with faint praise, probably the result of combining a shameless anthropomorphism with politics.  Yet Jane Smiley did it in Horse Heaven, assigning a whole chapter to a Jack Russell terrier's reflections and opinions.  Brilliant writer, Smiley. Her style is not so much staccato as a short line followed by a rambler which complements the brevity perfectly.  It's more like a respect for "line-and-length"; a model of syntactical self-containment.
But I digress.  As the lit crit people say, I've begun this blog 'in medias res'. I've invited myself into this vast cyberspace with whoever you are to share--I think that's the right word--my Cartesian self as far as it goes.  And of course, the cogito cannot live up to its reputation, even at the best of times.  Gardening, travelling, bird-appreciation, animal and horse advocacy, environmental concerns, old movies, the (ro)mantic arts, women's health care, working out at Curves, dog-training, elder care, big-band-era and 60s music, and vegetarian-in-progress recipes are featured in my curriculum vitae (the let's-get-real one, not the one we prettify for others.  After all, the continuity of time deludes us into thinking that life, like happiness, is a continuous state.). Since I'm new to blogging, at some point, I'll post my entire 73,000-word novel in a sidebar--or e-book it, I guess--as well as, well, whatever strikes my fancy.  If you care to follow along, so much the better.  As for now, I take this ufo of a blogspace as my interlocutor with a very shaky hand.  Like Chekov said:  all you can do is hold your hand out in the dark (and hope that someone takes it).