Two-Stage Movement

Two features of such a world are important for us here. The first is the alternation between two perspectives of existence: one an "oceanic" sense of submergence in a larger unity, the other a sense of individuality which is not that of the ego, that is, is not primarily aggressive or fearful.

Northrop Frye, Words With Power

The Litany of Abuse

Thinking about the many things I do at night, the prospect of seeing a play or two at the Stratford festival this year gets me excited. The excuse: my fiancée's Aunt from Trinidad is coming here for a month or so, and we think she'd appreciate, as a teacher, watching a performance of Coriolanus or Oliver the musical.

I don't know how much I'll enjoy Colm Feore as Martius, or Coriolanus, in this year's performance. After reading, studying, and writing a paper on the character of Martius (Coriolanus) in last year's Advanced Shakespeare course, I always picture him as the presence of a towering, muscle-bound, aged general of wisdom exterior held by a cracked lynch-pin over a bloodthirsty and psychotic soldier interior - whose biting rhetorical venom pours out the true self-destructive, militant human passions. A tragic figure driven (in words first, and then action) by a vision of:

[...] the citizens of Rome as baleful, self-destructive fallen beings; living passively in a nightmare world driven exclusively by a passionate, fatalistic urge to devour the poisons of evil against all great and common sense. This is the diabolical or tragic vision of language in Shakespeare: human beings as fallen creatures, who, unable to overcome the evil of this world with language, give up on this god-given power in exchange for dominion over this fallen world.

What I hope are apt, Frygean words in an old essay used to explain as succintly as possible the passionate hair-pin drive behind one of Shakespeare's most jarring and disliked (anti-?) tragic heroes. I, for one, hope that Feore is able to inspire real phobos - terror, fear and aversion - in his audience with harsh, raspy, eviscerating delivery and a snarling, spiteful voice. That's what I felt reading words like these:

Who deserves greatness

deserves your hate, and your affections are

a sick man’s appetite, who desires most that

which would increase his evil. (1.1.164-167)

I'm still uncertain for one, looking at that photo - thinking Feore inspires a modest Canadian, not a bloody-curdling Elizabethan feeling of dread, like Stephen Harper in the face of the Media.

Lazy Sunday

Another lazy Sunday - after an exciting, fun-filled Saturday - doing laundry and catching up on recent movies so far. I just finished watching a fantastic movie, Mirrormask, translated to the silver screen from a young adult's book written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean. There is nothing short of amazing, modern imaginative computer graphics in this modern day Bildungsroman produced by the Jim Henson Company. What is most remarkable is how, quite literally, the book is animated in the movie - it being a typical Neil Gaiman fabulist and inspirational tale with a multi-layered plot: one part identity fable, two part meta-fictional allegory.

The second movie, which I finished viewing in the early hours of the morning, is Jared Hess's newest slapstick or knockabout comedy Nacho Libre. Jack Black is perfect as Nacho, the absurd Friar who dreams of becoming a 'Luchador' to win fame and fortune in the name of his own fold of impoverished orphans. A great movie to watch, in my eyes, if you can appreciate the usual vaudeville gags and routines of modern comedy: the funny man as Victim, the double-act, verbal wit, obscene jokes about the body, parody and caricature, in other words, slapstick or knockabout comedy.

UPDATE: Watching the modern medieval-romance movie, Tristan and Isolde starring such names as James Franco, Sophia Myles and the likes, for the second time.

Hope Deferred Maketh The Something Sick

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

Vladimir (Didi) in Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot

Don't You Put It In Your Mouth

Knowing I have an early morning rise - taking my fiancée to the spa as a graduation gift booked fittingly on the one year anniversary of our engagement, as well as four years and four months in sum together - today, still here I am awake and reading from the Book of Jeremiah. Presently I have three books on the go, one for each season of my day: Amadis of Gaul in the morning and early afternoon, The Stand for evening work breaks, and The Bible during those late nights. My reading schedule: romance in the morning and early afternoons, horror in the evenings, and prophecy (with some sleep) from dusk till dawn.

Because ye speak this word, behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood, and it shall devour them.

(Jer 5:14)

The Paranoid Vision

She had fallen asleep there, and this morning she was more than half convinced that she had dreamed the entire program. And that was the nub, really: everything had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating anxieties.

Stephen King, The Stand

The Unforgettable Job

Myths of a paradise lost in the past or a hell threatening us after death are myths corrupted by the anxieties of time. Hell is is front of us because we have put it there; paradise is missing because we have failed to put it there. The Biblical perspective of divine initiative and human response passes into its opposite, where the initiative is human, and where a divine response, symbolized by the answer to Job, is guaranteed. The union of these perspectives would be the next step, except that where it takes place there are no next steps.

--Northrop Frye, Words With Power (313)

"The West shall shake the East awake"

Saw the third and perhaps final installment of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise tonight, this one subtitled: Tokyo Drift. The movie had the usual spectacular, intense, and awe-some mythical stunts and a well-developed, modern human plot to keep apace. Even elements of the movie seemed, symbolic-wise, to rise above the mundane to a poetic, if not mythical level, and for me were quite reminiscent of things Marshall McLuhan had written in Understanding Media.

Associated with this transformation of the real world into science fiction is the reversal now proceeding apace, by which the Western world is going Eastern, even as the East goes Western.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Knockabout Comedy

The funny man as Victim - of the bully, of the unexpected, of his own overreaching, of Fate. He Who Will Be Put Upon, to the audience's delight. A whiff of cruelty here, in the enjoyment of another's misfortune.

Tony Staveacre, Slapstick: The Illustratred Story of Knockabout Comedy

Waiting for my Chaplin and Keaton DVD collections to arrive. Sometime down the road I'll have to get some Marx Brothers, too. Thinking about seeing this movie soon, about a workaholic architect who finds a universal remote created by that evil genius Christopher Walkin.

Avoid It Like The Plague

When the evening was spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, two thousand students attending Kent State University in Ohio went on the warpath--big time.

--Stephen King, morbidly sandwiching lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" atop a throng of university student protesters moving in mass, hysterical protest just before they are brutally slaughtered by American military soldiers, in The Stand.

And Fled From the Sepulchre

I have very little to say these days, even apart from a few, selective events in my daily personal life which I choose to admit. Trying to keep old habits, I suppose, like always keeping apace reading a fresh book, but the intensity that comes with competing against other people has withered over the last year. One goal I set for myself is to read every single book, word for word, and line after line of the King James Bible. Yesterday, I sat down and started reading the Gospel of Mark from start to end for the first time, and just finished it earlier today. The motivation for reading Mark in particular? Reading Harold Bloom's acclaimed and very unique, Jewish scholarly examination of (and partial attack on) the Bible, the 'New Testament' and typical Christian - i.e. Frygean - exegesis in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.

There is working of course, but for me that goes without saying.

The truly grave matter? Saving for that upcoming wedding next year, and, periodically, keeping my fiancée sane as heaps of pressure from arrangements for the great event begin to accumulate.

Then what?

Take The Damn Shot Already

What About Books?

A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadbast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce to risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book . . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume--something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades [...] But, if you want the freedom to go anywhere, talk about anything, then write books . . . . There are places only books can go. That is the advantage books still have. This is why I write.

Chuck Palahniuk, "The 'Guts' Effect"

Stand

I suppose I ought to write something after half a week has passed, including some momentous occasions such as graduation ceremony on Monday. Graduation felt like a matter of performing my role as graciously and courteously as possible for the benefit and delight of my family, as well as fiancée's family. My mother was actively taking photos of my fiancée and I every waking moment, as well as every visible opportunity, with every possible photogenic variation of family cameos exhausted. I suspect quite honestly that my mother took over a hundred photos, not including the many memorable opportunities filmed with her digital video recorder, too. Keeping up in true Hilary Swank style following the great event my fiancée, her family and I stopped off at Taco Bell to glut our famished stomachs - the graduation reception offering little more than lemonade, fruit punch, three types of sandwiches and cake when it came to food. The best part? When my mom pledged to give my fiancée and I, as graduation gifts, enough money to cover the majority of the expenses for our trip to Trinidad in August.

Otherwise I slept in, exhausted and stressed from all the fuss after graduation Monday, worked yesterday afternoon and evening, and finished reading the trilogy of Arthurian romances attributed to Robert de Boron earlier. Back to reading King's The Stand - for me: a fair-paced, developing book to read.

The Sleep of Reason

Quite a few busy nights this week: simply working a full shift from 3 to 11:30, and afterward heading out to the bar to help clean, close and clear the place for Viv in the wee hours of the morning.

Early in the morning - often before I head to bed for the night - I've also been trying to write a second article on 'Dating and Marriage' for an upcoming issue of a friend's Christian e-zine: Alive.Born.

Otherwise I finished reading Cujo and subsequently decided to keep reading Stephen King. Next: The Stand.

The Graal

Another day, and a moderately interesting one. Yesterday, starting at noon, work began early for a few of us from the night shift. We received our basic training and safety instruction followed by a test for our order-picker ('cherry-picker') operator licenses. I was the only amateur of the group, the sole person to have never previously operated one of these machines in the workplace. My prior experience with technology in the workplace consisted merely of computers, pump-trucks and assembly-line production for light plating.

After a short but swift eight and a half hour shift I ventured over to my former work to pick up an order of mine--Hadji Murad. Upon entering the store I met up with my favourite cash supervisor who happened to be on break so we chatted somewhat before I disappeared back onto the 'sales floor'. After some time perusing, I gathered some of the other, forgotten conspiracy theory books written by the infamous authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Such as: The Messianic Legacy, The Dead Sea Scroll Deception, Temple and the Lodge, as well as Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett's The Templar Revelation. Later I handed the books over to my fiancée, who is ever so slowly reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail coincidentally as her brother is working on a group project in high school English class on The Da Vinci Code.

Then it was a brief rest at home, cooking a quick meal before heading out to see my fiancée at the bar, playing and losing, fair and square, a few games of pool to her, and then taking her home following a prolonged double-shift at the bar.

It's about time to hit the sack.

Movie Weekend

Nothing but spending time with my fiancée, attending church, eating, and watching movies this weekend: saw Over the Hedge, Jarhead, V for Vendetta, Underworld: Evolution and Munich.

After getting fed-up with that Lynn Picknett book -- with only a few pages left - I've gone back to reading Cujo again. Next book: Tolstoy's Hadji Murad.

The Proud Heretick

A seemingly wise, paradoxical aphorism just popped into my head a few minutes ago about my dismissal from Chapters:

Yesterday, I saw greater respect and even more gratitude shown to me by my fellow co-workers and ironically from the upper management team following the initial, jarring experience; something which might never have happened if I just continued going about performing my daily routine like everyone else.

I earned a notable business reference, inspired first-hand the fear and awe that even petty truths can inspire, and underwent something on a small, corporate scale that is tantamount to martyrdom--a Frygean mythical experience if I ever knew one.

I have lost nothing as a result of this experience but gained a new sense of liberty.

The Corporation and the Heretic

Know what I'm good at?

Getting abruptly dismissed from a bureaucratic corporation, like KFC, and now Chapters, due to "insubordination." Well, KFC, that's a whole other story, or several--I once worked with a manager who, while I was working under her, willingly conspired as an accessory to her now dead, lecherous (pedophiliac) husband's murdering and disposing of the bodies of two Meadowvale teens. She was caught trying to eliminate all traces of evidence linking her husband with the nearly unsolved mystery.

But that has nothing to do with why I was dismissed. (Sounds like a John Grisham movie recently aired on TV)

As for Chapters, well, I begged to differ with our new tyrannical manager in writing and got caught in the act. Sounds Greek to me ... (come on, this reference is easy). Stupid? Yes. Regrettable? No. I have a full-time job elsewhere with better hours, better wages and better opportunities.

Since I don't have to work tonight at Chapters, instead I'm heading out shortly to watch the movie Over The Hedge.

The Alarm Clock Code

Shortly after waking up yesterday I paused, or rather yielded reading King's Cujo after getting a new book in the mail. The book: The Secret History of Lucifer, is written by one of the occult authors made famous by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Lynn Picknett. Her books, including The Templar Revelation, subtitled 'Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ', which she co-wrote with Clive Prince, are about on par in terms of notoriety (and reputation) as Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Now, I know, as a (former) university student of literature - especially one who loved the 'classics' - I should know better than to take these pseudo-histories seriously. The point is: I don't. I read not only for the obvious intriguing conspiracy theory, but even more so as a literary exercise in patience. Reading 'trashy books' - an open-ended classification for the haphazardous - periodically makes for good practice in keeping up an open mind aerobically, by plumbing whatever depth these occult writers with their sometimes believable but often bizarre agendas wish for whatever length of time and pages.

The other book to arrive, which I purchased after reading the (highly recommended) book The Virgin and the Grail: Origin of a Legend by the University of Toronto history professor Joseph Ward Goering, was Merlin and the Grail: The Trilogy of Arthurian Romances attributed to Robert De Boron. That is, the first known tales to have wrought a successive link with the sacrosanct grail in the (French) Arthurian cycle with the cup of Christ and Christian traditions and dogma.

How long before the intrigue surrounding The Da Vinci Code and its back-drop conspiracy theory wanes from our short attention spans? Trust me, I saw the movie recently. Followers, or somnambulists, of The Da Vinci Code will everywhere awaken not too long from now with some of the worst cases of cultural hangovers and amnesia since the days of Vanilla Ice.