Archive for past blast
The Art of Scolding
In 1987 I promoted a story about “Secular Organizations for Sobriety” [SOS] that appeared in the Buffalo News. SOS was one of those secular humanist initiatives promulgated by Paul Kurtz’s publishing enterprises out of Buffalo, in this case “Free Inquiry,” a quarterly journal that published critiques of supernatural belief and religious dogma. I was Executive Editor of Free Inquiry at the time.
SOS was started as a secular alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, which has numerous religious overtones (“a higher power,” “the Serenity Prayer,” and so on). SOS has kept the peer-counseling component and left out these overtones.
I was interviewed by a Buffalo News reporter for the story. In the course of the interview, I said I had “a lot of friends in the arts and music community who were beset by terrible problems with alcohol.” The next day that quote appeared in the article. (The photograph of me accompanying the article made me look like a long-time “friend of Bill” myself: eyes not completely open, my hands clutching at a cup of coffee. I wished I had been better prepared for the interview.)
That night I went to the Pink Flamingo, a gritty Buffalo pub where lots of writers and artists took their recreation. I had been a regular there for a couple of years. I walked in, saw about a dozen people I knew and some good friends, and went up to the bar to order something (I am guessing a shot of tequila and a Molson Extra).
“Hey, Bob!” A good friend of mine, “Fay,” tapped me on the shoulder. I gave her a kiss. Fay organized arts events and wrote articles freelance.
Fay smiled, but then said plainly: “We all read that article in the News today, how all your buddies here are terrible alcoholics.”
I winced.
I was surprised by what my friend said next.
Fay neither rebuked me nor wondered aloud how I could disparage and embarrass my friends. Instead she said, “You drink here, and elsewhere, as much as we do, and often with me and everybody here. It would have been delightful had you mentioned *that* happy fact as well.”
Rather than telling me that I was a hypocrite, she said, in effect, “We like you, and you can tell the world you are one of us.” I was humbled by Fay’s gracefulness and courtesy.
Here was the “us” of whom I was a lucky part: a gregarious, generous, and hard-working coterie of writers, artists, students, musicians, film-makers, arrangers, editors, curators, and their friends and lovers and roommates and their relatives who repaired to the Pink Flamingo to drink, plan projects, receive solace, read out loud, and debate everything.
After Fay and my other Flamingo buddies made it clear I wasn’t going to be scolded any further, we talked until 2AM, feeling the love, as it were, and I was reminded that scolding might succeed best as words of welcome that can rescue relationships and fortify friendships.
- Reposted from NoContest.CA
Robert Creeley
This morning I came upon a sound file of Bob Creeley reading a long (for him) poem called “En Famille.” I hadn’t read or heard that poem before. It moved me very much, hearing his voice, hearing his words. I am stunned to realize that my teacher has been gone for more than 10 years. Below is what I wrote at the time.
—
4 April 05: Corresponding with friends about Robert Creeley, who passed away the other day, has been a solace. Creeley was a good guy, and he was certainly good to me. When I was his student, he saw beyond my ruthless go-getter attitude, he tried (without great success) to teach me to go for singles and not home runs when writing about poetry, and he talked to me like a guy he’d invited to his house. Creeley was somewhat reticent and curt in a New England way back then, and he wasn’t very comfortable in class – a point I made very clear in a memoir I wrote called “Creeley Teaches in Buffalo” that was published in the essay collection “Robert Creeley: The Poet’s Workshop.” It wasn’t that Bob didn’t try at times to get some dialogue going – just that, when he did try, it was so surprising that his students, at least the ones in my class, literally couldn’t speak. A couple of years after I published the piece, I moved back to Buffalo from Stanford and visited Bob, and he said of it, “That was probably the best I could have hoped for.” I took this as a compliment – him saying that he was grateful someone had recorded faithfully what being a student in his class was like. About a week later, though, playing with that sentence in my mind, I saw another, clever, very Creeley-like, and quite probable meaning: “It was the best I could have hoped for FROM YOU, Basil.” *laughs* Both assessments were probably right.
The Times of London has a good precis of Bob’s career. It notes that “as a character [Creeley] transformed himself from an originally quite angry personality into an increasingly genial one, and his public readings of his work had a large following. Indeed, the celebration of his 70th birthday at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in October 1996, devoted to readings and lectures by him and others, lasted for three days.”
My favourite Creeley poem is called “The Whip”:
The Whip
I spent a night turning in bed,/my love was a feather, a flat
sleeping thing. She was/very white
and quiet, and above us on/
the roof, there was another woman Ialso loved, had/addressed myself to in
a fit she/returned. That
encompasses it. But now I was/lonely, I yelled.
but what is that? Ugh,/she said, beside me, she put
her hand on/my back, for which act
I think to say this/wrongly.
What luck might dawn
Two posts from basil.CA’s eighth year:
20 Jan. 09: You don’t have to be trusting, or have a warm heart, to be kind. I am colder, and farther away from you, than Neptune.
27 Dec. 09: Twenty-seven years ago today I was a groom. Shortly thereafter I understood that I could predict the future no better than I could read the past, and that my intelligence was narrow and intermittent. Eventually I stopped thinking of myself as a “smart guy.” My chief value and purpose became work. I work very hard and I work every day, to see what luck might dawn.
—
Thus ends our little review.
Tempi cambi.
Goodness
Two posts from basil.CA’s seventh year:
15 Jan. 08: When it comes to fostering moral and humane conduct, courtesy is superior to compassion. It certainly springs from a deeper well.
10 May 08: Can a person be vain about his or her own goodness and still be truly good? I have wondered about this for years. I think the answer is yes. [I did not tend to like such people very much, though. Still don’t, a pity.- Oct. 18, ’15]
Feedback gratefully received
A post from basil.CA’s sixth year:
21 Nov. 07: Years ago, when I was just starting in Vancouver, I got a job doing Investor Relations for a public company. My job was to draft news releases, presentations, brochures, and the like, and present them to management and staff. One staff member always tore them to pieces: “What about THAT, and THIS, etc. And you forgot THAT, etc.” I did my best to address all these concerns and maintain a professional demeanor.
After awhile my main client, the company President, evidently guessed that this regular show was beginning to make my smiling responses seem a tad bit “forced.” He turned to my colleague during one of these meetings and noted, “Where were you when the page was BLANK?” While this remark later became my unofficial job description on basil.CA — “Essentially what I do is stop pages from being blank” — it silenced my colleague thereafter, sometimes to the detriment of the company’s IR activities.
Feedback must always be gratefully received.
Devotions
A post from basil.CA’s fifth year:
23 June 06: My world is narrow by choice. I don’t have interests so much as devotions, and very few of them. What might *appear* as interests are either accommodations to the world, necessary personal maintenance, or goof-ups.
Luck and grace
A post from basil.CA’s fourth year:
6 Oct. 05: I have happily made it to a point in my life where I can dine out pretty much whenever, if not also always wherever, I want. But free food is still my favourite food, whether it tastes like luck or like grace.
She’s still in diapers!
A post from basil.CA’s third year:
27 February 04: On Tuesdays and Fridays I have a long commute from the West End of Vancouver to the pastoral town of Langley, where I teach university part-time. I pick up my first bus at 5:42AM, switch to the Skytrain downtown, then zip off to Langley from the Surrey Station in a bus that’s getting less and less quiet. With the sun rising earlier, I’m enjoying the trip more, listening in to conversations. Tuesday:
“My son said ‘motherfucker’ yesterday. He’s three years old! Monique told me I should put hot sauce on his tongue every time he swears.”
“Won’t work,” said a cherubic toughie whose lips held an unlit cigarette for the entire trip. “I tried it once, and the next day I came into the kitchen and my little girl was drinking hot sauce from the fucking bottle. It’s beyond hope. Last week we’re in the car and we hear a siren, and she goes, ‘Shit! Cops!’ She’s still in diapers!”
We Stand on Guard for Thee
A post from basil.CA’s second year:
11 February 03: Canadians have a socialist sense of entitlement but a capitalist expectation of accomplishment. Alas.
“For the sake of a series of gestures …”
“In front of me a couple of young people are arguing in low voices about the nature of their affair: Are they ‘dating’ or are they in a relationship. If they are just dating, how serious is it? And isn’t the fact that the boy didn’t invite the girl to Thanksgiving dinner at his parents’ house an obvious obstacle to its being a full-fledged relationship? It’s simply a mystery to me, since this most American notion of ‘dating’ has no equivalent in French … This very un-French way of turning the date itself, and later the relationship as such, into a separate entity, living its own life alongside the two lovers … The oddity, too, of the mania these lovers have for verbalizing, evaluating, codifying, and, when it comes down to it, ritualizing anything that might happen within the framework of their relationship … For the sake of a series of gestures, that sense of the unexpected, the romantic, is lost, which in Europe even the most trifling love affairs preserve…” – From “Tocqueville’s Footsteps: A Journey Ends,” by Bernard-Henri Levy, in the Nov. 2005 Atlantic Monthly. (The pregnant ellipses are Levy’s.)
Quite Imperfect Wisdom
My least favourite maxim of all time most certainly belongs to George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Its banal ubiquity has not increased its charm any. Remembering the past is usually a necessarily step in *repeating* its calamities. Historical records of religious and clannish rivalries, confidence games and marital treacheries, and tragic hubris and the rest of it are no doubt worth remembering, but not for any contraceptive function.
“I’ve had some time to think about you”
“How hard would it have been to say some kinder words instead?” sings Patty Griffin in “Long Ride Home.” I love that line. No personal pronouns.
The Muse
I’m not a great creative individual by any stretch, but I do respect my muse and do *not* screw with it.
My friend kat passed along this letter by musician Nick Cave, which he wrote to MTV in 1996, in which he explained that his muse was “not a horse.”
My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature. She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition. My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!
Clarinetist Sidney Bechet called his marvelous memoir “Treat It Gentle.” The “it” wasn’t his instrument, or his or another person’s heart (oh, he was rough with those!); it was his muse, the mysterious source of his musical invention. That book scared the shit out of me. I know exactly what Cave means, above.
The respect vice pays to virtue
Liberals loathe the political Right’s hypocrisy and unfairness. Conservatives loathe the Left’s immorality and weakness. The groups’ estimations of their own qualities, though, are less precise.
The question of “hypocrisy” is particularly interesting. La Rochefoucauld noted that “hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue.” One can’t be a hypocrite without recognizing that virtue – that morality – exists. This recognition it itself makes hypocrites superior (in their minds) even to decent, noble liberals who discount “morality” as dogmatic and unrealistic. Think of fundamentalist Christians who think that belief in Jesus is the sole criterion to enter heaven; one’s behaviour is beside the point. So, to the Right hypocrisy is a good thing, though they don’t say so.
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