The Writing After-Life

I wanted to write my Memoirs, but I got writer's block. So I hired a ghost-writer to write the book for me. The results are invisible, but I do sense an authorial presence. So I'm making presents of non-copies for creative visualizers who enjoy imagining the content of a magical ghostly gift. I think they'll find the prose hauntingly beautiful.

The memories I meant to put into my Memoirs have dissolved into phantoms of forgetfulness anyway, which is just as well because all sorts of unorthodox and embarrassing things happened in my life which I'd rather forget. I needn't tell readers about that -- I don't want to make a spectre of myself.

Finding a ghost-writer is a good way to market shadowy shades of literature -- even fifty shape-shifting shades, perhaps. No unkind book reviewer will find any grammatical faults at all, and the book will waft readers straight into a world of Holiday-From-Reality magic. I imagine already my Memoirs on bookstores' shelves, enticingly hovering in the Fantasy section.

In January, I hired the ghost-writer to write my How to Keep to Ten New Year's Dream-Resolutions. My writing career is really taking off. I'll be mysteriously prolific this year.

The 'fifteen minute city' offers zero minutes of peace and quiet.

A healthy city needs a town centre. A commercial centre. "Downtown" is where you find banks, shops, offices, Municipal Hall, museums, professional services conveniently clustered. You go there to do business so you don't have to do business everywhere else. Beyond this commercial centre there needs to be a non-commercial fringe: the residential space. 

Historically, towns began as commercial centres on trading routes, or places where transport routes intersected. For convenience and access to work, growing populations gradually settled near and around them, each family in their own house or cottage with its own food-producing garden and often a fence or hedge for privacy, and for peace and quiet.

The "fifteen minute city" has no minutes for peace, quiet and privacy. Commericalism is everywhere. There's no relief from business, from busy-ness and crowds -- the "madding crowd" which Thomas Hardy recommended getting far away from. There's no escape from what poet William Wordsworth called "getting and spending / laying waste our powers". He meant powers of reflection, of quiet unhurried thought. The old-fashioned residential zone beyond the Town Centre vouchsafed gardens, fruit trees, cats on fences, porches with a mailbox and a shelf for the sprinkler that kept the lawn alive on which the kids could play. The fifteen minute city means the opposite: compression and some supposed version of "convenience" ... but never fifteen minutes of solitude or silence. 

How mentally healthy are people crowded together without solitude, silence, and space for reflection? There used to be an ideal of a Green Belt surrounding an urban centre, reached in stages of sub-urbia which gently declined into wooded space. Now we contemplate a city comprising only one continuous Grey Belt, in which "work, play, and business" are bundled together. This doesn't work for those who want a private house and garden some distance from noise, commercialization, sun-blocking high-rises, and jostling crowds.

Sit down, Comic

What's a comic's job? Number one job is to be funny. But too often, stand-up and TV comedians decide they want to be a social influencer. They seem to confuse sarcasm in aid of a political stance with being humorous. It doesn't work. How much "ally-ship" can a good joke survive?

Preaching is inherently non-amusing. You, Stand-up Comedian, are heir to a long line not of preachers but of the opposite. You represent the begging-to-differ folks. Your forebears are clowns, jesters and jocose performers for royal courts in which kings and queens had to be amused -- but not openly challenged. 

Court jesters got away with saying the unsayable, the unpopular, by cloaking it in word-play and subversive artifice. Too often today's comics want to be social commentators and influencers: they're talking to their tribe. So they don't subvert ("turn under"), they parrot the correctness slogans of the tribe. 

But that's no surprise. since mainstream media, TV specials and comedy clubs want comics to please a hip, "woke" crowd. So the comic seems to feel safe focusing their act on personal grievance, since a grievance culture is what we now live in and people relate to it; audience members curate their personal brands of victimization. 

What a distance the comics have come from their jesting antecedents, whose role was to challenge prejudices, not to follow the crowd -- but to challenge cleverly, subtly, with double-entrendre. Sadly, stand-up today mostly rises only to single-messaging, confusing propaganda with humour, and reacting to the threat of cancel-culture. When that fear rules, it's better for the comic to sit back down.

It was more entertaining when comic-as-social-critic lampooned and laughed at the prevailing message, the "right thought" of the moment. The comedian is not supposed to prop it up. Let the social-improvers do that, the self-appointed dictators of values.

It's a cultural loss when the comedy community joins that crowd, because we need humour more than ever to play its subversive role in boosting mental health. Transgressive laughter heals; correctness fosters anxiety. So do your traditional job, Comedians -- transgress!

It's better than merely parroting correctness, or being a weepy fish shoaling with the grieviance crowd. 

                   

See also: "The Comic in Tragic Times" -- https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-comic-in-tragic-times.html

The Poop-Up Art Show by J.M.W. Turder

The Anti-Dog lobby of Saanich BC has set up an activist art display by J.M.W. Turder. It features misty seaside paintings (scenes sans chiens, of course), plus a large central sculpture made of dried dog and cat turds. On-leash anti-dog "keep 'em out of parks" activists, joined by "keep cats indoors" activists, have been busily collecting desiccated dog and cat feces. The artist fashioned them into a fetching sculpture -- in protest against fetching by dogs of any sticks on beaches.

Unfortunately for the Poop-Up artist, someone mistakenly donated dried-out raccoon poop. A local turd-nerd noticed and attacked the anti-pet activists for misrepresentation of mammalian identity groups. 

A counter-art show in the style of Whistler is being planned by dog-walkers who dog-whistle their dogs very successfully at parks and beaches, and think it's the City Councillors who should be kept on a leash. 

"I don't want to have to read a 50-page Bylaw every time I take a stroll with Fido," says one citizen. 

She won't have to worry about the Poop-Up Art Show though, because the Health & Sanitation Bylaw has  banished feces from all indoor spaces. Freedom of Expression activists are protesting that one, but it's too late -- droppings-in at the gallery have dropped off due to atmosphere of municipal contentiousness.  

Trouble makers pictured here:       

       

                                  

      

    

Why is AuduBON now considered AuduBAD?

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was a mixed-race (French/Creole) son of a West Indies planter and slave owner. Growing up in France he became a painter. Birds were his specialty and his passion. At 18 he moved to North America,  eventually becoming an art teacher and professional portraitist of people and of birds. His avian drawings were well-received in Scotland and London, then published in book formats with text 1831-39 and now universally recognizable. Later Audubon moved to New York and brought out more bird books in partnership with other ornithologists, which led to the use of his name by the first Audubon Society in 1896.

Many regional and national Audubon Societies were formed, but as John Audubon has in recent years been called a racist white-supremacist, by 2023 many of the societies had dropped his name. Others haven't, because to them the name "Audubon" stands for conservation, not racism.

Plant and animal names derived from the names of those who first described them (genus and species nomenclature devised by Carl Linnaeus), have also come under attack. Many naturalists involved in description and nomenclature have been accused of "colonialism". 

But it isn't only individuals coming under attack; Science is as a whole. We'd expect scientific classification to be above or outside of identity politics ... but it's not allowed to be. Nothing is. Science, learning and study may no longer be a-political. Everything has to be absorbed by the Culture Wars. 

Many European naturalists whose names were attached to plants and animals became "colonials" when 18th - 19th century shipping technology made it possible to travel the world collecting specimens from distant regions which contained earlier settlers, the ab-original ones (the Latin prefix "ab" meaning before). "Our ancestors had already discovered those plants and animals", say their descendents. Of course they must have, but they didn't devise a scientific classification system for them -- they hadn't devised written language at all. The Linnean system is about species themselves and their biological descent, not about the people who brought the specimens from the field to the laboratories of Europe (where the microscope had also been invented, which made detailed description possible). 

Like other aboriginal people, in Celtic lands the pagana ("women of the countryside") knew all about native herbs and their properties for good and ill, health and disease. Plants, roots, leaves and berries could heal, or poison. Pagana, knowing which was which, were powerful and others might revere or fear them. Accordingly they were called wiccans, druids or witches. They were anonymous like the native peoples of the New World ... but the official classification of species was done later by biologists. It was never about race-politics.

Yet now, not only are Audubon, Linnaeus, and specimen collectors black-listed; the names of plants, birds and animals themselves are being laundered by Correctness. There are offenders in your own garden that you may have to re-name, or dig up. No longer will you be able to host fuschias (named after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs) or dahlias (named for the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl). And abandon your forsythia, named after the 18th century Scottish horticulturalist William Forsythe, and your gunnara, after Johan Erntegunnerus, the Norwegian bishop who compiled Flora norvegica, 1766-72.

Bannish any Clarkia you host, named for Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But would your Echeverria be okay, named after Mexican botanist/artist Echeverria y Godoy? He drew the plants of Mexico and perhaps kept any views on slavery to himself. He might fare better than John Audubon. Lady Sarah Amherst, like Audubon an ornithological artist, painted her namesake-pheasant (and other) illustrations while living in India: terribly colonial. But no doubt "Joe Pye Weed", a lushly-purple pollinator-attractant, will be allowed to keep its name, as Joe Pye was a Mohican chief born in the northeast US in the 18th century.

There's a Cooper's hawk, a Harris hawk, and a Wilson's warbler -- common names all, so who knows which are infamous, and what for? How about the Rivoli hummingbird and the Anna's hummingbird, named for the Duke of Rivoli and his wife Anna? Do the name-censors know for what crimes they might have their names struck off the bird list? Or why an American Quaker naturalist and a Surgeon-General should be?

How far will this censorship go, we might ask? We can assume that in the present heated climate (societal, not planetary) it will spread like dandelion weeds. But Audubon Societies are conservation societies, and we should ask, given that 29% of all Earth's species are facing extinction, which is more urgent -- species-conservation, or race-activism? 

In any case, for many peace-loving gardeners uninterested in the Culture Wars, a dahlia will always be a dahlia and a fuschia always a fuschia. 

Passing the Parcel of Privilege

Remember the children's party game "pass the parcel"? A much-wrapped gift is passed around a circle of kids sitting on the floor; each one takes a layer of wrapping paper and ribbon off the gift and then passes it on. The person who ends up with the last layer unwraps, and "wins", the gift. S/he is usually meant to share it with the whole group (it's often a box of candy).

Are we playing the Gift of Privilege game, as adults? Who gets to be "privileged" now? It was originally (allegedly) white men, then all white people, all educated people, and eventually all races and nations were vouchsafed "equal rights" according to late-20th century western liberal-humanitarian values. 

But then, some identity groups claimed that this was only window dressing and that some groups were still more privileged than others. Black people, brown people, aboriginals, disabled people, trans-sexuals and a proliferation of other "identities" now clamoured for not equal but special rights. Equal rights were no longer an ideal, and "people" were no longer who we thought they were: they were not ethnic groups but "people of colour", not genders but "birthing persons" not women but "persons with vaginas" (though confusingly, not always ...) People were not physically or mentally handicapped but "differently abled". Then there's Non-binary people, Two-spirit people ... in short, there's no longer any "we" in "we the people".

This Pass the Parcel of Privilege game is the new infantilization, and it's gotten out of hand, as children's games tend to. Children start by agreeing to rules but end up howling "that's not fair" when they don't perceive themselves as winning. Now that attitude has invaded the world of universities (that speaker can't speak here), of government and corporate offices (follow DEI or your DEAD to this employer), and of media (take a look at current Submissions Guidelines of book publishers and magazines). The rules of academic, professional, public and media activities are in constant flux, depending on which participant howls "not fair" the loudest this week.

Remember when some decided that literacy and the existence of the "literati" was elitist? Elitist (from the French) simply means "chosen". Society's always going to make, and disagree about, choices. At present we've chosen a new elite army for the Culture Wars. These are the troops of the culture-cancelati. It looks like this uncivil war will be a long one. The fact that it will soon be fought by out of control Artificial Intelligence will only increase the casualty rate among independent-minded liberal-democratic classically-educated humanitarians.

Insensitivity Training Improves Workplaces

Sounds counter-intuitive? No. When employers tell you they are going to build trust -- mistrust them. "Corporate team-building" uses Sensitivity Training, which aims to promote diversity even as it enforces uniformity. Never trust a thing that is actually being its opposite. Better to do the real opposite: Insensitivity Training.

How would that work? It would do what 19th C investigative journalist & magazine editor Ida Tarbell recommended: practice not minding things that you can't change anyway. In the workplace, stop minding that everyone's not the same. Some will be a pain, some delightful, some in-between: diversity. 

1. Resist group-obsessing about skin colour, ethnicity, and diverse ableisms.

2. Forget "identities".

3. Drop the word "racism" (especially after the adjective "systemic"). Also drop "harm", "triggering" and "stigma".

4. In the name of freedom of expression, appropriate whatever you like. (Let's call it intersectional creativity.)

5. As far as respect is concerned, respect the right to privacy.

6. Let no manager harass and bully you into giving up your right to introverted non-participation in group whining and parroting.

7. Understand that the core of democratic liberal humanistic civilization is acknowledgement of other people's right to express opinions you despise. Then, ignore them. (You'll get better with practice.)

8. While it is unkind to express hate, there are times when hearty dislike is unavoidable. 

9. Forget micro-aggression, make your just aggressions adult-sized. Share them when appropriate, and then retreat into dignified silence.

10. Don't get drawn into competitive victim-narratives.

11. Embrace the Enlightenment ideal of merit. Who wants to live in a shabby, meritless world of self-obsessed equitable mediocrity?

12. Claim your right to walk away from offensively invasive staff "training" meetings to the safety of your own desk. 

Let's let the Sensitivity Elephant leave the room

The Haunted Car

Some homeless people live in cars or vans. It's more cosy and private than a tent on the street, but are they living in a haunted vehicle? Those ones are the recent models. 

Some low-income folk drive old cars, with their lovely old atmosphere. You can roll up the window, switch on the analogue radio, cruise along, enjoy the view, dog in the passenger seat, backpack in the back ... 

By contrast, new vehicles which are to be eventually government-mandated, are haunted. Nothing comes out of the exhaust pipe, and everything going into the car is digital and monitored: haunted by ghostly digital spies. 

Electric means demon-filled. E-car spy devices know (and tell authorities) by "global positioning" where you are, and where you've been. They know when you got into the driver's seat, when you got out, where you got charged up, what sites you listened to online, who you texted, whether you drank alcohol, whether you exceeded the speed limit. Eventually, will police agencies be able to lock your door and stop your engine remotely? Who needs an old-fashioned police chase when you can be arrested by remote?

It's bad enough for those living in high-tech houses bristling with digital devices (spy techware smuggled in under the label of "convenience"); soon we'll be forced to drive demonic cars as well. Ghouls and evil apparitions will travel abroad -- as our stowaway passengers.

🎃 🎃 🎃

For a description of the Digitally-Haunted House -- a story: 

https://treewatchvictoria.blogspot.com/2022/10/haunted-house-on-digital-halloween-night.html

Here's a tale of the old-fashioned ghost:   https://www.shorthumour.org.uk/10writersshowcase/everyday.htm

Oh no ... it says here we're being replaced by computers!

Remembering Librarianship Past

 What has happened to the time-honoured scholarly side of librarianship? Even in the 1980s, at the UBC School of Librarianship there was still an assumption that librarianship had something to do with books, reading, literacy and scholarship. There was recognition of the historic role of public libraries in extending knowledge free of charge to the populace. Libraries were agents of democracy, free speech, and equal access to information. 

And now, in the 2020s? Judging from the Agenda of the Burnaby Public Library’s Board, libraries are no longer distributors of diverse information but arbiters of “misinformation”. They appoint themselves judge and gatekeeper of what the public should be allowed to read, in print and on-line.

Some libraries have or intend to have Social Workers on staff, as well as extra security staff prepared for “trauma-informed incidents” in the branches. They used to provide research material about drugs and addiction, now they provide the drugs  – onsite. They provide “safety”: safe spaces for the racialized, indigenous, those in need of “equity, diversity and inclusion”, those feeling “harmed” by other people’s ideas, and those needing a whole alphabet to define them (2SLGBTQIA … etc…) but not necessarily the alphabet used by the literate reader.

The public library is now much concerned with mental illness, but in its early days it was a zone of mental health, being a quiet peaceful place where patrons could wander among book shelves, calmly peruse a newspaper, borrow a book from the magical trove of novels, verse, and sundry non-fiction. Every citizen had access to the haven of literature in peaceful civil surroundings – a blessed retreat for those living in crowded quarters or blighted urban ghettos. 

Now the space for books has shrunk, while libraries find space (and budgets) for “non-traditional resources” such as video games, juggling kits, blood pressure cuffs, bike repair kits, radon detectors, vehicle diagnostic scanners, and ukuleles. Seriously. And this despite the fact that fully 48% of Canadians have inadequate literacy skills (according to the Conference Board of Canada). Instead of fretting about non-traditional resources and “non-binary” culture, why don’t libraries concern themselves once more with the literacy/illiteracy duality, and resources for bridging it?

As for novels, librarians now approach them with fear and suspicion in case they harbour non-correct thought or ideas that make others feel “triggered”. To trigger readers is the reason a writer goes to the effort of writing a book in the first place: to trigger imagination, new ideas, open-mindedness. Maybe, instead of appointing themselves the judges and censors of books, librarians should simply stock them all and let readers make up their own minds about them. Never mind "non-traditional resources" – diverse reading is what their taxpayer-based budget is for in the first place.

It’s time for public libraries to return to their core role as protectors of free speech and to be run by librarians, not social workers, not climate action leaders, not thought-police and anti-misinformation crusaders. The public are smart enough to figure out the information wars for themselves – if they can read. According to Statistics Canada, 49% of adult Canadians read below high-school literacy levels – immigrants, indigenous and low-income being the lowest. These are the very groups the library "social work" and mental health mission is particularly targeting. So both schools and public libraries are failing to deliver on their core responsibility: supplying books and advancing literacy.

BC Fairies are short-staffed

 Bulletin from BC Fairies: EXPECT LONG WAITS ON HOLIDAY WEEKEND

Public:  Oh no, not again. When are the Fairies going to get their act together? Look at this:  "Coastal Celebration hoverers removed for repairs". Why doesn't the Government just take over the whole Fairy Fleet? Bring back the Ministry of Magic-Travel.

*  *  *  *  *

Fairies Management:  Sorry, Ariel, but no you cannot take stress leave right now. We're understaffed. We need all sprites on board. It's a holiday weekend.

Ariel:  I don't want stress leave, I'm retiring for good, I was promised by CEO Prospero himself -- he promised me my freedom. After all the super-natural service I've given for all these years, I deserve it.

Management:  I know, I know, but later, Ariel, we promise ... just wait until we find some new hires. Everybody keeps calling in sick. Everybody claims they're "burned out".

Ariel:  So hire some Fireflies. We Sprites can't do it all -- get the Fireflies in for night shifts. 

Management:  We're trying, believe me. It's a really bad time, what with half the Magic Fleet off for repairs. One needs a wing repair, another has a defective hover mechanism ...

Ariel:  Not my problem. I was promised my Official Retirement, and I'll sue if I don't get it.

Management:  Just one more service, Ariel. We need you to inspire the Naiads with the example of your faithful loyalty -- those Nymphs of wandering brooks and lakes keep wandering off on sick leave.

Ariel:  So call in the Nereids. Sea Nymphs are more loyal than Freshwater Nymphs. 

Management:  I would, but their leader Thetis has taken them on a Dolphin Break. It's in their contract.

Ariel:  Well, my contract says "we shall miss you, but yet thou shalt have freedom". So: good-bye.

Management:  But if you could just delay a bit ...  Oh NO ... here's another damning media headline: "Public let down by BC Fairies once again. Terminals full. Magic Fleet betrays travellers and supply-chain truckers. Fire the lot of them!"

Ariel:  The travelling public no longer believes in us like past eras did. You'll just have to find a new type of recruit. Try the Elves and Gnomes. They're more down to earth than those airy-fairy Sprites with no work ethic. As for me -- I'm flitting off out of here.

The 24-Hour News Cycle -- critique by an old-fashioned Romantic

"The News" is too much with us; late and soon

getting and spending, it fills up all our hours;

Little we see in publicity that's ours;

and endless pinning notifications are certainly no boon.

Where once we read editions, rhythmic diurnal times,

now there's nothing edited at all,

for that's beyond the Media power -- 

with this our minds are out of tune.

I'd rather read a bottled note washed up by the sea,

and hear the News through Triton's horn

blasted out at six o'clock, and once again at three.

Always Be Ready To Try an Old Experience

Do you get the feeling that too often, new experiences are inferior to old ones? That the hip novelty bandwagon goes too fast, and the new doesn't stay "new" as different newly-correct behaviors and products are forced upon us ...? 

One longs for Old Experience, like the practice of turning a blind eye to other people's habits, like accepting that the world is full of diverse opinion, and like getting Life Guidance from literary classics, not social media.

Thankfully we can still have that lovely Old Experience of turning a printed page. Of looking up a word in a printed dictionary. Of receiving written notes from friends, rather than pinging "notifications".

What about the old experience of physicality when not your smartphone but you yourself knew where you are on a landscape? And there on the landscape, you might see surviving woodland, or smell the scent of mown grass. You might even see some, an old-fashioned sweep of shimmering emerald lawn.

That's the delight of heritage neighbourhoods with Settler Architecture (home-y houses with flowery gardens settled on quiet streets, and pet cats roaming free). And there, is the old-fashioned certainty that you're not being spied on from every wall and roof-top by CCTV.

There's also that old-fashioned habit of people sticking to a gender, or if they choose to gender-blend they just quietly go ahead without a political song-and-dance as if we're all at an endless performance of "SOGI, the Musical".

One longs for an Old Experience of public clock towers and pay-phones, of land-lines, paper money, cheque-books, and parking meters and tip jars that take coins. Without coins, what will we throw into the wishing well when we make a wish? (How about our smartphones?) And what might we wish for? A Society For the Preservation of Old Ways would work well for some.

Anyone can try the Old Experiences that give relief from the downward drag of post-post-post modernity.

 JestJests  

A 'Senior Lives Matter' movement?

       Handicaps are not failures, and we all have some -- physical, social, educational, circumstantial. They may even signal prowess (the best golfer gets the highest handicap, and the racehorse with the most victories carries the heaviest weight). In our society being old is a social handicap. A "dis-ability" is not even required. 

       Too often able seniors are marginalized. For example, when submissions to galleries and journals are invited from designated groups (the disabled, racialized, trans, neuro-diverse and so on), seniors aren't among them. In that regard, seniority really is a handicap. 

       Society, then, isn't more equitable than it was, the musical chairs have merely been re-arranged on the floor. When the music stops, the elderly are the ones most often eliminated. This accomplished tribe is demoted, but in the culture wars ageism gets a free pass, and seniors have no "Senior Lives Matter" movement. Maybe that's because older means wiser and wisdom includes acceptance. Older may also mean tired, as in tired of sectarian battles. 

       Seniors are supposed to retire gracefully, as from a field of battle. Even if still at the height of their creative powers, most don't have that lean and hungry look that signals prowess. 

Leave me alone, I'm tired of sound and fury, I want to cultivate my mind in peace.

Yet we all know people in their 90’s who aren’t really in retreat. They are hungry for knowledge and information. In Canada, people over 55 are the biggest news-consuming group, according to www.marugroup.net/polling.

Staying informed and sharing views about current issues is recognized as an aspect of healthy aging. Ditto engaging in creative pursuits, which are often patronizingly considered appropriate to the retirement years: people are more willing to admire the paintings which older citizens exhibit in craft fairs than they are to listen to their political views.

       According to https://rishihood.edu.in/creativty-and-creative-ageing/enior, UN statistics reveal that the 65+ age group is a fast-growing part of the world population. Currently at 12%, the proportion of seniors is expected to rise to 22% by 2050. Will the rights of almost one quarter of the human race matter less than those of the other three quarters, in 2050? Where’s the Old Lives Matter movement? 

According to Statistics Canada, “from 2016 to 2021, the number of Canadians aged 65 and older rose 18.3% to 7.0 million". This  represents nearly 1 in 5 Canadians (19.0%), up from 16.9% in 2016. Older Canadians are staying healthy, active, and socially involved for longer. The cohort aged 85+ has doubled since 2001, and according to projections, could triple by 2046. 

In 1981 BC seniors made up 5.4% of the labour force; by 2016 they made up 11.6%. Yet there has been no preferential hiring for them; on the contrary, in many professions they're forced into mandatory retirement despite being the most experienced and skillful workers on the scene, and despite the "quiet quitting" habit their juniors go in for now. Still, some seniors are taking up more roles in the economy, though without a movement signifying that they matter. What might "Senior Lives Matter" accomplish? For a start, maybe it’s time for art curators, editors and social influencers to add “elderly” to the list of disadvantaged groups from whom they solicit contributions. We could also make a point of supporting post-retirement commercial enterprises launched by seniors. We should encourage seniors to write their memoirs, which will provide tomorrow’s insights about the history of today. Memoirists report from a ring-side seat on the unfolding drama of current affairs, and the longer you’ve lived on Planet Earth the more insightful your judgement will be. Let us all, and our descendants, sample the smorgasbord of wisdom offered by elders in their memoirs. 

Part of wisdom however is the waning of appetite for conflict and competition. “Sound and fury signifying nothing” loses its attraction. Presumably the closer you get to death the more you concentrate on things that signify something. You might be less inclined to blow your own horn, which is why, where elders' rights are concerned, other groups must help with the "representation". The American Association of Retired Persons says that less than 1% of American grant money goes to seniors' rights and ageing. In Canada, the federal Ministry of Health did announce another $30 million for brain health research this year. Not much is spent on seniors' equity rights however, or on grants for creative projects in later life.

That seniors should be disabled by younger people’s assumptions and dismissals is an unfair handicap. International Ageism Awareness Day, October 7th, is a good moment to think about it.

                                                                                                                JustJests

-- S. B. Julian 

The Very Detrimental Caterpiller

The world is full of meanings we aren't aware of. "The world is so full of a number of things / we should all be as happy as kings", wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but the world of thought and ideas is overwhelming and we learn to focus. Out of our tiny focus, we extract our own treasured, and rigid, belief system. Most people narrow their awareness just to get through the day. Maybe it's a safety instinct. We no longer aim for a capacious or well-furnished mind; public school systems certainly don't. People are told they need to "feel safe" and not be "triggered". Too often, other people's ideas are seen as "bullying". 

Hence a renewed book-banning mania. One Canadian school system decided to remove any children's book written before 2008, as "detrimental" for the "marginalized" -- including classics like Anne Frank's Diary, The Very Hungry Caterpiller, Anne of GG, and the Harry Potter series (of course).  Schools were instructed to specially support the Afro-Caribbean and indigenous students, and if that's the new meaning of "inclusive", then schools have problems with word definition. Maybe they'll throw out the Dictionary as well, as something detrimental -- maybe thinking it's as bad as the Very Detrimental Caterpiller. 

A womxn, a Genderqueer and a Heterocentrist Walk Into a Bar ...

... and there they meet up with a polyamorist (who orders a beer with a chaser), a cupiosexual (drinks non-alcoholized beer), a greysexual (put water in his wine), a pomosexual (ordered the un-labelled home-made brew), a spectrasexual (gazed for an hour entranced by the menu list), a sapiosexual (only drinks wine with a label in Latin), and a neptunic -- who couldn't decide what to order.  

Did you know how many genders and sexual identities there are and the poetic labels used for

them?

"Rainbows are nothing new to us mixologists," says the philosophical bartender. "People walk in here full of diversity, but once drunk they're all the same. Drunk is drunk -- inebriation's a great equitizer and way to relax and chill in a fragmented world."

 

Ageism and the DYE Movement

I bumped into an older woman I hadn't seen for some time, and found her brown hair had turned a different colour.

Gone grey?

No: pink.

Ah, dyed it. No one goes grey any more, when you can get a whole rainbow in a bottle.

Pride-dye? Proudly striving for youthfulness?

Yes, because ageism is the last "ism". The one we still tolerate.

Ageism is the DYE movement, which moves against the elderly: "Diversity, Youth, Exclusion".

There are compensations though. When they get to a certain age some elders stop worrying about people-pleasing, keeping a job, maintaining a reputation and being politically-correct. Those are the ones who might speak up for their more timid peers:

                                 

                                  Media Visit to Granny's Free Speech Kiosk

Interviewer: So Granny, this is a nice little business enterprise you've made for yourself.

Granny: Yes, censorship opens up a surprising number of commercial opportunities.

Interviewer: So, in taking this opportunity would you call yourself a free-speech heroine, or a trouble-maker?

Granny: I don't aim to be either, although heroism often does cause trouble -- for someone.

Interviewer: Will it make trouble for you if someone decides your speech is too incorrect? Aren't you afraid of being shot?

Granny: Yes -- so this is bullet-proof glass I'm sitting behind.

Interviewer: Ah. Opinions can be dangerous. Maybe you should add a Danger-Pay Surcharge to your fee.

Granny: Really, speech should be free. If someone is wise and broke, I'll express their forbidden thoughts gratis. (But don't tell the rich folks ...) Everything is monetized now. Your own magazine charges buyers or advertisers to read your words.

Interviewer: True. I see you have quite an audience around your booth. Do some get upset if they don't approve when you contradict fashionably-correct attitudes?

Granny: I do get an audience, but no one has to stay and listen if something offends them. The other side of free speech is the freedom to not listen.

Interviewer: You're performing a public service, eh?

Granny: Indeed. I'm retired, I've got my little pension, I can afford to do this because I don't have to please an employer who could fire me for expressing what their pollsters have determined are not the popular public attitudes of the moment.

Interviewer: Well good luck, Granny! Stay safe.

Granny: I'll be fine. The up-side of being an old granny is that by being dismissed by influencers and virtue-signallers, we oldsters are also often overlooked by cancel-culture.

* * *

"Democracy is not about how many people vote but about how many people feel free to say what they think in public".

-- V. Ramaswamy, 2022


"... in the sunset of life ... I feel it my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear."



-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton,1898

Decrepitude-Envy

                      A short play presented at Seniors' and Community Centres                       by the Alexandria Players (https://alexandriaplayers.blogspot.com/)

Three friends -- Liz, Eve, and Rena -- sit chatting over coffee.

Liz:  This will be the last time we get together for coffee 'til spring. Which warm climes are you two off to this winter?

Eve:  Why is it always "climes", not climates, when people talk about  holiday plans? 

Rena:  Yes, why? And always "wanderlust", never just plain travel.  

Eve:  The romance of the voyage, I guess. The journey. Anyway, to answer your first question, I'm off to Arizona. If I even get past the airport, that is. Airports are so fussy about security now. I never know what I can take onboard.

Liz:  I know. I just hope my new metallic hip-joint won't set off alarms.

Eve:  You're lucky you've only got one. I've got two new hips and a new knee to worry about.

Liz:  Of course, I've got my pacemaker too.

Eve:  What with all the titanium, plastic in our cataract-free eyes, gold in our teeth and computers in our hearing aids, we own more mineral wealth than some of the smaller countries!

Liz:  You've got computerized hearing aids?

Eve:  Yes. The "SmartEar". Much smarter than a phone -- you program it to recognize phrases you don't like so it can automatically digitally delete them. There's a barrier between your ear and your brain, so you can filter out opinions you disagree with. 

Liz:  Brilliant! Much better than writing Letters to the Editor about them. Robotic Intelligence, eh?

Eve:  Somehow it uses the gold crowns on your teeth as a conductor of ... something or other ...

Rena:  (drily) Thus transplanting your brain into the robot. Oh, the irony.

Eve:  No Rena, gold ... not iron. Sounds like your hearing's going too. You need a SmartEar.

Liz:  It's my pills I'll be worried about -- airports are so fussy about drugs.

Eve:  (sighs) Yes -- remember when being beyond a certain age meant being beyond suspicion too?

Liz:  No longer. My cousin was accused of smuggling drugs in his colostomy bag.

Eve:  And the airport security line-ups are so slow. But I've got a terrific new walking stick for passing the time: the knob comes off the top so you can keep your -- shall we say -- "energy drink" inside it. And there's a button on one side that makes an umbrella pop up if it rains. But here's the best part: another button can make bullets shoot out of the shaft!

Liz:  Bullets??

Eve:  Yes, it converts into a gun! So if there's one of those terrorist incidents, you're armed. Brilliant eh?

Liz:  Wow, that's what I call concealed-carry.

Eve:  I predict walking stick firearms will soon be legal.

Rena:  (rolling her eyes) So the airport check-in desk has a sign saying "Triggering language will not be tolerated", yet triggers on guns will be? I'm so glad I never travel.

Liz:  Oh but you should! Think of the fun you're missing -- once you get out of the airport, that is. I take a few pills to calm myself in pre-boarding. I've got this great new pill-dispenser in the shape of the Prime Minister. To keep track of how many pills you've forgotten you've taken, they come out of his mouth one by one. You can pretend they came from a government Pharmacare plan, rather than being paid for out of your own pocket.

Rena:  (drily) At least you didn't pay for all the metallic hardware yourself.

Liz:  A benefit of being a senior. Have you noticed all the airport staff look about twelve? And that they act weird? Like they all have autism or mood disorders or something that young people go in for.

Eve:  Yeah, like "social anxiety". What is that anyway? They should make a Prime Ministerial Pill-Dispenser for it. Where did you get that product? I wonder if there's one with pills coming out of his other end -- like so much of what politicians say.

Liz:  I'll send you the website URL. Airport staff probably get them on an employees' health plan -- the "Anticipatory Mental Illness Plan".

Eve:  Young people today have so many ailments it's unbelievable.

Liz:  I call it decrepitude-envy. 

Eve:  It takes a life-time to become decrepit, but no one wants to earn their diseases any more. Anyway (she lifts her coffee mug in a toast) I'm off to buy my airline tickets. See you next Spring, Chickens!

Liz and Rena:  'bye-bye ... 'bye-bye ...  Happy Flight-Trails! 

-- They make a last toast with their mugs.

Literature-Lib: Looking back at the days of liberated fiction

"Lionized" by the literary establishment during his/her own time, many a once-popular author is now denounced for racism, sexism, transphobia, and general deficiency in "DEI" credentials.

One such is Mordecai Richler, whose novel Barney's Version, lavishly praised upon publication, received Canada's Giller Prize 1997. It was "charged with comic energy and a wicked disregard for any pieties ..." says the blurb on the cover.

Disregard for pieties is still called wicked, but no longer in a complimentary way. "Wrongthought" is no joke; it's even being criminalized.

The hero of the novel (Barney), when falsely accused of variegated personal and professional immoralities, in his own defence responds with his own "version" of events -- and his entertainingly provocative views on culture and politics. 

If he thought the latter were bad back in the 1990s, he'd be horrified at the atmosphere today. Satirical humour was his weapon against political correctness, but his weaponry did nothing to stop the ignorant armies clashing even more on our darkling plain of wokeness. (Matthew Arnold too, writing at the dawn of liberal humanist tradition, would be horrified to see the 21st century's plain, swept with even more "confused alarms of struggle and flight".)

As for the Giller Prize (a prize Richler would never be nominated for now), and the ideology of present juries: how could change happen so quickly in the literary world? Such shrinkage of imagination and narrow-minded condemnation of free thought? How could the imposition of obligatory self-censorship have gone so far so fast? Yesterday's lionized are today's verminized.

A literary critic writing in 2022 objected to Richler opposing the "special pleading" of politically correct groups, and his disagreeing that Western society is unjust toward minorities. Indeed, if he was writing today he'd probably be sued by allies of identity groups who felt triggered, harmed and epistemically violated by his words, although writing today he'd probably never find a publisher at all. Publishers are businesses, and they want to stay in business in a field where personal free expression is now unpopular.

In fact, according to the University of Southern California, we're not even allowed to refer to a "field" in case it brings to mind the fields wherein slaves once worked. Compassionate people may want to save others from hurt, but history will still be history, even if we legislate public ignorance of it.

There were no Anglo-Saxon names among authors on the 2022 Giller prize shortlist, and only one the previous year. Of course, Canada gets more international immigrants every year, but Mordecai Richler might suspect a bit of "special pleading" going on here behind the Giller scenes. Since 1997, when he won the prize, there has been less satirical humour on offer. We live in an era of intellectual straightness, of hearing only self -- an arid environment of cultural grazers who survive on poor soil and poor nutrition, and need much herding.

In an interview on Writers & Company, Eleanor Wachtel noted that Richler had been called "irreverent and smart-ass", and warned that listeners might find the excerpt he was about to read "raunchy". That word seems quaint; today, we'd warn of "toxic masculinity" that might trigger "trauma-spectrum diorder".

Richler himself said he aimed to satirize the absurd while witnessing his own times. If he thought his 20th century times absurd, one can only guess what he'd think about "the times" today. More than a little "out of joint".

Reviews of Barney's Version in 1997 used the words "wonderful, hilarious, gripping, touching and humane". Today they'd more likely accuse him of being "racist, trans-phobic, sexist, stigmatizing and trauma-inducing", and if Richler gave a reading, the de-platformers would be shouting outside and waving placards. 

Freedom From 'Harm' Means Freedom From Labels

You are not fragile (from Latin, frangere, to break). You won't break every time someone hits you with a label. 

You are not a victim, but you live in a spreading victim-culture. So step away from the miasma.

To see yourself as harmed or unharmed is a choice. No need to be on automatic pilot about it. Pilot the good ship "Unharmed". Skim over choppy waters, sail past slings and arrows. They call this "building resilience", and used to teach it to kids. Now schools teach them to worry about their mental health and to find their place in the victim-hierarchy. If they're not put high on the Trauma-Spectrum Disorder Scale, they feel disadvantaged and unprivileged. (And if they don't master this spectrum-game, they'll never succeed in the current University.)

Something will get us all one day ... disease, freak accident, nuclear war ... but until you really are mortally harmed (dead), why not aim to live harm-proof rather than harm-curating?

The Way of the Skeptic rejects group-think labels like "harmed", and its twin, "unsafe". We can choose to ignore labels as we do seagull droppings: unpleasant, but just step around them.

We needn't feel harmed by people who think differently, or look at them as the opposition. Other people's opinions are not weapons trained on you. They are just thoughts. We don't need to fear the thoughts of others; only your own thoughts can harm you.

And no one can oppose you if you haven't agreed to oppose them. Instead, you can agree to live and let live -- safely. Without labels, identity or other. The word "identity" comes from the Latin word "idem", meaning "same" -- like all the members of a tribe. It's better to be freely a no-name brand; be a one-off.

Real Poets Write Wine Labels

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down", opined Robert Frost.

Since he said that, poetic structure (not to mention content) has continued to -- let's say -- devolve. Dissolve. Much current verse sounds more suited to a therapy session than a poetry collection. 

"Serious" poets, often trained in Creative Writing departments, get away with turgid, tangled, concept-free feeling-pieces. Reading them is like staggering through a bramble-patch, clawed by cleverness and prickly diction. Let's take another path, think some readers. 

They might try strolling through a wine shop. They might conclude: real poets write wine labels! Some play around with comic sub-genres but most favour the romantic style. Like 18th-19th century Romantic Poets they draw on the language of nature: flowery and suggestive with a plethora of fruity scents and smooth flavours. Phrases like "dark smoky velvet" tempt the oenophile, and adjectives like "clean, fresh, and crisp", and "spicy, peppery, and bold" are popular. 

Wine labels also revel in synonyms and antonyms. So as to please every prospective buyer, presumably, and to tempt every sommelier, wine diction covers several bases at once: "sharp but generous", "balanced yet assertive". They are suggestive, lulling us with promises of the "juicy and tropical", others with the "musky and earthy".   

"Herbacious" is a favourite word; everyone likes some herb or garden plant which the term calls to mind. Its partners in rhyming language would be "vivacious" and the imprecisely teasing "bodacious". When the wine-label poet wants to invoke sensations, the encomium will brim with "hints" of things ... citrus, oak, cedar or honey. Overtones and undertones grace not only the wine but the wine-verse describing it.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" is one subtext; or perhaps the comparison is with a winter's evening before the fire. "Full-bodied" works for both. 

Alliteration is prominent in the products' names as well. Nature-based like the label descriptions, wineries' names have become whimsical: "Pink Poodle", "Crow Canyon", "The Black Chook" (an Australian reference to Australian poultry). Puns and wildlife are popular in naming, as in "Fish Hoek", "LAB", with a black dog graphic, and "Yellow Tail" (with kangaroo).

British Columbia wineries are not to be out-done in the lyrical/colourful nature-linked name game, offering "Blue Mountain", "Red Rooster" and "Blue Grouse", plus "Wild Goose", "Burrowing Owl" and more ...

What with poetic oenophilia combined with artful label design, a visit to a wine shop is like a visit to an art gallery. Even if you're not a wine drinker you could get drunk on the lyrical language of labels -- rather more than on the contorted ambitions of "serious" verse. And, unlike that (or Coleridge when visiting his dream-caves of Kubla Khan), your dip into the pleasures of wine-verse will allow you a "pleasing finish".

The Necessity of Inappropriate Laughter

If it was appropriate, it wouldn't be half as much fun. There's no such thing as inappropriate laughter of course -- laughter is so automatic that that would be like inappropriate breathing. Laughter bubbling up or bursting forth unplanned is a type of honesty. It bursts as a force of nature, not of manufacture. The world needs that safety valve.

Yet, in cartoons or performance, during a speech or at a party, some people do complain that a joke was "inappropriate". Tasteless it may have been, but it has a function: Neitzsche and other philosophers have mentioned the release of tension and the joy of surprise.

It's socially useful to have the ridiculous laughed at (from the Latin ridere, to laugh). It's more than a personal response, it's a social corrective.

When laughter is labelled inappropriate it's usually about sex, gender, race, religion, or something ending in "ism". One person's laughable "ism" is another's no-go area.

Yet laughter goes everywhere; that's why it's powerful. No one has been able to imprison it -- not chilly religions, dictatorial bureaucracy, humorless teachers or anxious parents, no matter how repressive their reactions are. Laughter Laughs Last.

Think of how dangerous the world would be without it. Neitzsche also pointed out is that to oppose a bad idea, laughter is more effective than anger. If we had only anger imagine how much more violent life would be, how full of warfare.

In former ages court jesters were a professional group. In ancient Greece, under the rule of Philip of Macedon they were linked with Court Poets and Philosophers. Likewise in the English Courts of Henry VIII, James VI, and Charles I, where William Summers, Archibald Armstrong and Muckle John performed respectively.

This was reflected in Shakespeare's plays, with their essential Fools. ("Fool", linked to "folly", comes from the Latin noun follis, meaning bellows -- which are full of air and provide oxygen, like humour does.) Being full of air, someone to be jeered at (Shakespeare also dressed characters in ass ears etc.), the Court Fool could say what no one else could, escaping the murderous censors of the time yet managing to tell truths. 

Some comics do that today. In their act (or writings or cartoons) they present a farrago of material (a "mixed medley", originally meaning a mixture of fodder:  "far-corn").

Humour too is food, for both personal and social nourishment. Spontaneous laughter might erupt when we don't know what to think about something ... and then our subconscious tells us. Conflict is short-circuited, resentment deflected and something else takes the blame ... and escapes. Call it the scape-joke.

My Cat Changed Their Identity

My cat decided to self-identify as human. Human he is, in his own view, whatever the real world might think. The real world (the human-humans with whom he lives) is a nest of wrongthought and denialism, in his view. To be human-identified is his "right", and his most strident miaow repeatedly proclaims it.

Two-spirited and species-fluid, he orders take-out (taken out of the fridge at any time of day or night), and claims ownership of any napping surface (humans' bed, laundry basket, front porch, all keyboards ...). Everyone else is a mere settler on the furniture.

He reserves the right to change his identities and his pronoun-wails at will (e.g. from king-cat to queen-cat, fur-baby to stalking lion, butterfly-batterer to couch potato). It's his right, the wail-miaow reminds us.

When identifying as Hunter, he de-colonizes the garden of rats. When cats of other persuasions enter the garden he avails himself of the right to hate-screech, and then de-platforms them off the fence -- although no other cat is allowed to utter hate-screech. His "positionality" is that the one privileged group is himself. He has no time for any confounding variables, and won't tolerate any concept-creep around it. At least you could never accuse him of micro-aggression, it's macro all the way with him, er ... them.

Perhaps he (sic) suffered betrayal trauma in his kittenhood, we think. Or maybe he has Borderline Personality Disorder due to some early stigmatization while still in the litter. We are committed to being tolerant. There could be a heartbreaking victim-narrative here, a real one; there's no deepfakiness about Chief Cat. 

I think I heard a miaow just now; it was the take-out order miaow. Do we respond too quickly to their demands, we humans ask each other? After all, look how obese they're getting. 

But wait -- sorry -- forget I said that. We don't do fat-shaming here. Fat beings are merely other-shaped ... at least, that statement is as reality-adjacent as we dare to get.