To thine own self be true

Many quotables relevant to our Trumpian times:

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

“What bloody man is that?”

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

“Or have we eaten of the insane root/That takes the reason prisoner?”

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,/The instruments of darkness tell us truths,/ Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s/In deepest consequence.”

“Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings.”

“There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face:/He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust.”

“Unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top full/Of direst cruelty!”

“Look like the innocent flower,/But be the serpent under ‘t.”

“I have no spur/To prick the sides of my intent, but only/Vaulting ambition which o’er-leaps itself”

“I have bought/Golden opinions of all sorts of people.”

“Bring forth men-children only.”

“There’s husbandry in heaven;/Their candles are all out.”

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’”

“The primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.”

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

“There’s nothing serious in mortality,/All is but toys; renown and grace is dead.”

“A deed of dreadful note.”

“Come, seeling night,/Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day.”

“But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in/To saucy doubts and fears.”

“I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

“Be bloody, bold, and resolute.”

“I have lived long enough: my way of life/Is fall’n into the sear”

“I have supped full with horrors.’

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”

“They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,/But bear-like I must fight the course.”

N8TIVE

is widespread fear in everyone, everywhere.

People are worried about dying, aging, losing their looks, having their vehicles stolen, having Christmas packages stolen off the front step, having their homes broken into, having their kids abducted or run down, being assaulted on public transit, being trolled online, going bankrupt, not being able to afford retirement, having their phones stolen, being threatened in phone calls, having their identities stolen, losing their jobs, having the government take away their pensions and health care benefits, raising school fees, on and on.

Everyone at every age has things that not only worry them, but things that intimidate, harass, and terrify them. The Age of Anxiety revisited and to the max in 2019. People are incredibly nervous, fidgety, tense, neurotic, fearful and, increasingly high-strung more than ever. A mad dash to Christmas 2019, indeed.

The amount of trolling, agendas, and partisanship show that loathing and hate are stronger than ever in our society.

(by George, he predicted it all)

which is being used ruthlessly and more corruptedly by the Trumps and other dictators of the world, is that language manipulation and control are the keys to whatever con jobs they wish to foist on a relatively unsuspecting, otherwise distracted public.

This goes well beyond rhetoric and dog placement commercials, going directly to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and his famous “Politics and the English Language” essay. The way to advance corrupt or money-grabbing moves is to obfuscate and lie openly (Trump is now approaching 15,000 lies on the Washington Post tracker).

Again, modern education has failed by not allowing studies of language control and manipulation, like Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four or Huxley’s Brave New World or Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, to be taught in senior high English.

Instead, works of political correctness, which represent a limited, limiting agenda are often taught instead. Granted that such things as imperialism and colonialism need to be shown, it strikes me as negligent and socially irresponsible that works with deeper, more relevant messages for our time, such as the ones above, have been allowed to slip away and be forgotten or unauthorized. In short, there is little in secondary curriculum that addresses the issue of language being in peril at the hands of dictators and wanna-be kings like Trump.

God forbid there should be any critical thinking in schools today! As is, kids today are ill-equipped to endure the language abuse wave that crashes over them of late as well as future sloganizing and agenda-izing, online trolling, ubiquitous advertising, and shamelessly deceptive politician-speak.

And so the great dumbing-down of the 21st century continues unchecked and unaddressed by and in schools–what were previously assumed to be civilized/civilizing institutions of North America. Now no less than the preservation of individualism and autonomous, critical minds are in immediate and ongoing peril. Yup, dumbing-down of youth relative to advertising and politics is firmly de rigeur in schools today.

(Dean and Glen, first two on the right, 1988 thereabouts)

As Christmas fast approacheth:
-my parents; only eulogies
-my wife’s parents; eulogies
many close friends including:
-Glen Kirkland (co-author poet) eulogy
-Dean McKenzie (poet performer) eulogy and performance
-Stu Millman (jazz bassist) performance
-Glenn Martin (my Ed CI prof) only eulogy

plus all the famous people I have felt some affinity to ranging from Leonard Cohen to John Lennon to John Keats to Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf. A long list, indeed.

(after Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North)
dedicated to the late great Dean McKenzie

(We have administered these vast territories of North in an almost continuing state of mind…)

High latitude
vast flatness of poles
wind a whitewash
breathing lungs
stone-cold

(I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas and I find that this is growing apace each year, so that I really want to get it out of my system somehow…)

Cold enlarges consciousness
an inner feeling: hinterlands
We are stirred & sharpened
made precise, altered–
a mental nordicity

(The North is almost everything beyond the comfortable and familiar, everything frozen and dark, treeless and windswept…)

Arctic night
blizzard bone
drift of pelt & parka
polar values
break the ice in rime
evoke an introversion
like isotherms

(When men live in the North their values change…)

permafrost/permavision
cold Judas chill
solitude
& idea-flakes

(They live a lifetime and die when they emerge. They become citizens of a different country–that tapestry of tundra and taiga…)

blue-planed spirit
frozen subsoil
keen surface
cutting/nipping
uninhabited
vanishing point

(There was something spiritual about it, elements of magic having to do with the magnetic pole…)

brush-blade pointillism
breath & breathe
vision elemental
inland seas
frozen sonata

(Something really does happen to people up here…)

ice age cold snap
cold storage
icefields
pro-found snow-bound

(It cares so little and sort of diminishes you…)

pack-ice growlers
overhang design
spirit gathers hoarfrost
terminal moraine

(It looks so odd and cold you wouldn’t want to live there…)

chilblain shiver
raw polar night
boreal abstract
a treeline sensibility
gather & evoke
this nordic index.

Cheers, Dean-o!

(two-thumbs-way-up; Christmas listening nostalgia; Universal Music/MCA CD)

Every year at this time I break out my favorite Christmas CD–the diamond anniversary edition of Holiday Inn and White Christmas with songs by the great Irving Berlin. Warm memories of watching those movies annually with my parents on the old black and white through the ’50s and ’60s, remembering their enthusiasm for the vision of life and Christmas presented by those two classics. The big band sounds of another era–the ’40s and ’50s–and the best and happiest of what they remembered of their times–all come back with each song.

Listening to the CD, I remember my Dad singing along with Bing Crosby and the feeling I had while watching each song or dance number. Exquisite and exceedingly sweet or precious–all of it. It all comes back–those times, those memories, those deep connections, the feelings of those times–the ’40s and ”50s, (Holiday Inn, 1942) and (White Christmas, 1954), the memories of war camaraderie in the latter movie, and the sorts of extremes one would go to, to honour those who had once been part of one’s (war) life. So special, remarkable, and now-thoroughly, but charmingly, passé.

I appreciate the places and memories I return to each year thanks to the following songs:
Happy Holiday
White Christmas
I’ll Capture Your Heart
You’re Easy to Dance With
Lazy
Abraham
Be Careful It’s My Heart
I Can’t Tell a Lie
Easter Parade
Song of Freedom
I’ve Got Plenty to Be Thankful For
Let’s Start the New Year Right
Snow
Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep
What Can You Do with a General?
The Old Man/Gee I Wish I Was Back in the Army

Once one gets past the tragic darkness and individual salvations in/of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, the Crosby Christmas movies are two wonderful movie takes and, if one ever needs more of a lift, one needs look no further than an old New Year’s tv favorite–the effervescent Singin’ in the Rain with the ever-sunnyful Gene Kelly.

Romance, comedy, history, and making-your-own-fun-and dreams-come-true. All such large and wonderful seasonal worlds that lift any sagging year-end spirits–movies and music that have delightfully transcended time and our oh-so-limited/limiting, diminishing modern era.

by Edmo’s late great jazz legend Tommy Banks. His talented band and his first-class arrangements.15 classic tunes wonderfully reworked and delivered with some off-the-main-oft-trodden-path titles: “In the Bleak Midwinter’, “Snowfall”, “Where Is Love?”, “”White”, and “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”. Beautiful seasonal piano and conducting to boot. Easily the best Canadian Christmas instrumental album ever.

(Royalty Records, 2011)

Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, experienced on Christmas eve or Christmas Day. Dylan Thomas Reading was the first album Thomas recorded for the two women who founded Caedmon Records; this was the label’s first release in 1952. The special blue booklet of woodcut illustrations by Ellen Raskin (New Directions) was long a Christmas staple, too. Later came the excellent 1988 movie adaptation (Hen’s Tooth/Alliance) of the story. All are highly recommended reading, listening, and viewing.