Beth Kaplan's Blog, page 230

celebrating Nancy White

Cooking a chicken in anticipation - Anne-Marie and Jim are coming to dinner, and then we're all going to friend Nancy White's 70th birthday party at the Tranzac Club, organized by her talented musician daughters. A marvellously original and musical funnywoman is turning 70. Twenty performers, apparently, will sing her songs. We were asked to bring pictures for a scrapbook, and I have found some, including one from the tour Nancy and I did in 1971 of an adaptation of "Under Milk Wood" for Young People's Theatre - with music, as I used to say, by Gordon Lightfoot's evil twin. We survived a four-month tour of southern Ontario high schools and have been friends ever since. She's a national treasure, and I am honoured to be among the guests tonight.

When I saw the headline below in the NYT, I thought the article was about Jian and the fact that now there is ceaseless debate about sexual harassment - on CBC, in the papers, on the street. But it's about the recent attacks of two crazy men and the Harper government's threats. A very good article.
Don't Overreact, Canada

Jimmy Carter, my hero, and "Arcadia"

Who I want to be when I grow up, Part 2: My friend Juliet sent me this link to David Letterman's interview this year with President Jimmy Carter, who at 90 - 90! - is passionately engaged, articulate and informed. What a phenomenal man - author of a new book "A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power." And what he says about the prevalence of sexual assault and abuse is prescient, as this country can talk about little else these days. Inspiring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GEMI4JLPlY

Several treats on this dark rainy day - this morning, went to St. Lawrence Market with Anna, Matt and Eli. Eli is excited about everything he sees - everything - the red firetruck, the blue dump truck, the red leaves, the lello leaves ... the cookies at the market. He has the most sensitive hearing of anyone I know. "Too loud noiss!" he cries when an ambulance goes by - or even when I slam the microwave door. Though he doesn't mind banging on the piano, which he always does as soon as he arrives here. When does he start his cello lessons? I ask his mother, but she does not seem to have a reply.

And then Wayson and I went to see the Shaw Festival production of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" at the Royal Alex (thank you, David Mirvish!), tickets courtesy of my student and friend Tanya, the Shaw costume mistress. It's not an easy play; we're not used to the relentless Stoppardian torrent of words and ideas - as Wikipedia says, "The play attends to a wide array of subjects, including thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, chaos theory vs. determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics, landscape design, Romanticism vs. Classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18th century periodicals, modern academia, and even South Pacific botany."

Such an obtuse play requires a superb production to make it work, and luckily, here it is, an absolutely perfect cast, beautifully directed and produced. It's set in two eras in the same house - the early 1800's and our time; the old-fashioned ones live their lives, and modern academics try to figure out exactly what they were doing then. As someone who spent years doing research into the past of my great-grandfather, trying to solve various mysteries - a passionate love letter to him, for example, from a woman not his wife, how did that fit? - I identified with the fumbling modern academics. Loved Lord Byron, a major character though never seen, skulking in the background. A great afternoon. Recommended.

Shakespeare and Company: book heaven

If you want a treat, read the following article in this month's Vanity Fair about Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore opposite Notre Dame in Paris, one of my favourite places in the world. It's a wistful portrait of a time when books mattered, when writers were honourable vagabonds, when someone like George Whitman could not just exist but flourish and make a difference to countless creative souls. A million thanks to him for being the generous book-loving eccentric that he was, and to his strong and beautiful daughter Sylvia for keeping the whole shmear going against the odds. Can't wait to visit again.

One of my fondest dreams - that one day one of my books might be found there. I know, the chances are almost nil, but you never know. Keep your fingers crossed.

The magazine's pictures of the store are in the print version. Below are mine from my visit in 2009, including one of the famous beds where vagabonds sleep, and someone madly playing the piano upstairs.
 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/11/shakespeare-and-company-paris-george-whitman?mbid=social_facebook

Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Simpson nail it

A superb article from Paul Krugman in the NYT about the Republican victory.
OP-ED COLUMNISTTriumph of the WrongPublished: Nov. 6, 2014It?s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday.



And a terrific article by Jeffrey Simpson at the Globe, same story.

From The Globe and Mail: 
Republicans win, but America suffers

What Jon Stewart keeps saying over and over in his funny but pained way, is: Why did the Democrats just roll over and die? Why didn't they hammer home that the Repubs had blocked every possible legislation? That of course Obama couldn't deliver in such a poisonous climate, and in fact at least managed the miracle of health care? Why did they let those disgusting petty people control the agenda?

It's cold, maybe that's why I'm feeling aggrieved - very cold for the beginning of November with most of the leaves still on the trees, the city a symphony of swirling yellow and red. I spent the morning in 1978, reading my journal from that time in preparation for starting the next big project. What luck that I was so neurotically introspective, writing everything down, inspecting every sensation - she's so vividly present in the notebooks, my 27-year old self. I wish I could reach through the years and teach her a few things, voluble hyper-sensitive struggling soul that she was. But she had decades to go before turning into the serenely wise and wrinkled crone writing to you today.

Onward.

what every writer dreams of ... sigh ...

TIMOTHY
McSWEENEY
WILL NOW COMMENCE AN NPR-STYLE PLEDGE DRIVE. THE SHORT ESSAY THAT CONQUERED THE PLANET.BY TIM CARVELL- - - -It started quietly. The writer finished the short essay and sat back, pleased. He sent it off for publication, and the essay was distributed into the world. A few people read it. They showed it to others. Others began reading it. Soon, they noticed changes: They felt younger, more alive. Their warts and blemishes disappeared. Their reproductive organs swelled. Their hearts were filled with song.
They began to tell others about the essay. Soon, the essay was being copied—emailed around the world (with an appropriate copyright fee always, always being sent back to the author), and placed on websites. It was tacked up in offices, schools and churches. It was read from pulpits and from podia, and from the balcony of the Vatican. It was appropriated by a columnist for the Boston Globe.
The essay was set to music; it became an opera, a play, a blockbuster film. It became a well-reviewed ballet, and an avant-garde production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, staged by Robert Wilson, with music by Tom Waits—whose music seemed happy for quite possibly the first time ever. The essay became the shortest piece of writing ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It went on to win the Caldecott Medal, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Then it swept the Grammies.
Miraculous reports began to trickle in: The essay had closed an unclosable wound. It had brought peace where there had once been strife. It scratched the places that could not be itched. It tamed lions.
Word of the essay spread to other lands. It was translated into many languages. Relief organizations stopped shipping food, and began simply dropping the essay on blighted areas, which miraculously revived. The essay created droughts where there were floods, and floods where there were droughts. It converted water to wine, and vice versa. It partitioned those parts of the world that had hitherto been thought to be unpartitionable. It sowed peace and love. It raised the dead and smote the wicked.
After months of planning, the people of the world, at a given hour on a given day, all stood in the streets and read the essay aloud, in unison, billions of voices mingling into one as the essay soared out into the heavens in a fantastic global murmur. The heavens parted and the sun shone on the entire world at once, in a cataclysmic expression of joy, and all animals were given the power of speech, and all humans were given the ability to fly, and the unicorns returned.
The writer beheld all this and smiled. “This,” he thought to himself, “is a fine beginning.”

Republicans phooey!

On it goes. Now a guy says that Jian grabbed his crotch in university. It does not seem possible the man was able to indulge in sick behaviour for so long. The country is still convulsed and obsessed. In the words of the inimitable Tabatha Southey, on Twitter:
Tabatha Southey ‏@TabathaSouthey  5h5 hours agoI think the Canadian Tire flyer had an opinion piece about Jian.
On a sadder note, the poor benighted country to the south ... It makes me mournful to contemplate it. Except the news says that in 2016, there will be a new Democratic candidate and the situation will be reversed. Jon was wonderful last night, bringing us what small comfort he could; his people did a hilarious skit on the electoral success of a candidate called Money and the utter defeat of a candidate called Ideas, who was nowhere to be seen.
 And on a happier note, here's my decorated son with his short, similarly decorated friend and fellow axe-thrower. I just look at the smile, not the scribbles. But his tattoos are almost all of animals that he loves - otters, giraffes, swallows, a hippo, an owl, and he is proud of them. Everyone in his business has them. His mother tries not to sigh. Because since this photo was taken, there's another one. Several more, in fact.
Sigh.

horror

The madness continues - the Star gnawing away at Jian's misdeeds, and now the CBC's misdeeds, with potentially much more far-reaching consequences. Why did CBC brass not step in instantly when they heard hints of Jian's weird sex life? Would you have? I'm sure they had no idea how far it went.

It reminds me of the time I forbade my rebellious 16-year old daughter to go out in the evening; she turned and said, "Fuck you!" and walked out the door. I had no idea what to do. Nothing in my own past had prepared me for something like that - I never spoke back to my parents, never rebelled. When she came back - and I now know, she was expecting to be punished, grounded, yelled at - I did nothing, absolutely nothing. I thought if I ignored it, it would never happen again and go away. Instead, she later told me, "That was the moment you lost me." One of the biggest mistakes of my single parenting life, I now know. 20/20 hindsight - not much use now.

I think the CBC was the same. How to deal with the embarrassing issue of the nasty sex life of its greatest star? Just ignore it and hope it goes away, especially as no one officially complained. A terrible mistake, we now know, with 20/20 hindsight.

In the meantime, the redoubtable Dan Savage has published a fascinating piece. He's an expert on kinky sex and has interviewed a woman who dated Jian and enjoyed her bondage sessions with him. It was consensual, if creepy, in this instance. Another world, my friends, people who enjoy hurting and being hurt. A woman has published a piece in the Guardian about how she dated him for months and he DIDN'T hit her once. Why didn't he hit me? she asks plaintively. He must have been grooming me to hit me later, she says.

Spare us. I just plugged my ears, couldn't bear to listen - a news report on ISIS kidnapping and torturing children. Just plugged my ears - the Republicans taking over the US government. Now that's horror.

Sunday harolding

There's a word for the habit of hanging around cemeteries, apparently - harolding, after the film "Harold and Maude," in which the young hero likes to explore cemeteries and go to the funerals of strangers. I just like walking around the Necropolis, our beautiful local place of rest, where you find plenty of famous Canadians and very old trees and, today, fall colours and falling leaves.
Click to enlarge.


We miss you, Jack.

On the way back from my walk, I ran into a passel of neighbours, four in an intense huddle on the sidewalk. "What could you be talking about?" I cried. And sure enough, they were. "Why are there no decent people in public life any more?" cried one.
"It's classic Greek tragedy," said another, "or Shakespearean, the epic rise and fall."
"Are they implying there was a camera in the bum of his teddy bear?" said the third. "That he'd turn the bear around and then there was footage of what was going on - is that possible? I will never look at teddy bears the same way again."

And then I went home. In the sunshine, under the red and gold falling leaves, I went home.

schadenfreude, such a great word

The baying for Jian's blood continues; a surly "I told you so" piece by Noah Richler in the Star today, wondering if Jian is our equivalent of Jimmy Savile. As I've detailed here before, Savile, like Jian,  was Jekyll and Hyde, a charming public figure whose exterior concealed something vile. Unlike Jian, Savile was a loathsome monster who abused hundreds of small children over decades. Yes, the women Jian dated were young and vulnerable, but they were adults. They were grown-up women. There's no excuse for what happened to them, but let's not lose perspective. Let's not wallow in schadenfreude.

People at the Y this morning were all talking about him. At the moment, I am alone out on a limb of empathy for a very sick man with a very twisted world view, which he has obviously had for many years if not all his life.

What about the place of porn in all this? I've never watched it so don't know first hand, but an article in the paper yesterday talked about the ubiquity, not just of sexual images but of violent, horrific images debasing women. If you watch enough of that, surely you might come to believe that you can do what you want, as men do in the videos; that real women have no feelings.

That's all I can bear on this topic for today. I feel not just for Jian's family but for all the people who work at the CBC. What horrendous fallout.

This afternoon John my handyman and friend is coming, and we're shutting down the garden. Yesterday morning I opened my bedroom curtains to SNOW swirling by - not much, but white flakes, definitely. Today is sunny but cold. Time to rip out all the remaining plants, seal the windows, put away all the deck furniture. Cocooning begins. Six months of it. Ye gods.

On a cheerier note: I went yesterday to visit my grandson, and we played a fantasy game for the first time. He rearranged the pillows on his mother's bed into a semi-circle, sat with his feet under one, asked me to do the same, and said, "We dwiving in de car. I dwiving."
My God - he's 2 1/2 and he wants his driver's license already. I said, "Where are we going to drive to?"
He thought. "To de lello twain. And de gwey twain."
So off we went to the train station, to find the yellow train and the grey train.

I can't wait to find out where we'll go next.

Here's the poor neglected child in his backyard where he has nothing to play with.

mercy for Jian

The whole Jian affair is making me feel a bit sick. Now two women have laid charges and the Toronto police are involved. Are we going to put this guy in jail? He's already a pariah, his life destroyed by his own brutish heedlessness. What's going on - in the media and on Twitter - is a pile-on, a merciless takedown. There's so much glee in his precipitous fall.

I love and respect the Toronto Star, hounder of the hideous Fords, but their enormous headlines and photos : PR firm dumps Ghomeshi over 'lies': are going beyond good journalism. The other article on the front page yesterday was about a political couple in Mexico involved in the narcotics trade who are responsible for the massacre of scores of students.

I know this will be an unpopular sentiment: I feel sorry for Jian. Yes, it's possible to feel compassion for someone without excusing his behaviour. The man is sick, no question. He's not a murderer, not a child molester, but he is a narcissist, a bully, an egotist and a liar.

But let's not conveniently forget, just wipe out the years of pleasure and pride he gave us from his perch at the CBC, as he interviewed every interesting person and A list celebrity who came through and did so with intelligence and grace. We all enjoyed not only the talk but our new sense of Canada at the forefront of meaningful adult discussion. Canada, hip, edgy, out there.

The chase after fresh scandal meat is becoming savage. Perhaps the man is irredeemable; perhaps he will never understand that what he did to women was vile and very wrong. But I still thank him for his years as this country's premier broadcaster.

I'm just saying that we can be appalled by certain aspects of a man's life without turning into a lynch mob. We are all flawed. If you and I suddenly had limitless power and fame and adulation, if every door we approached was flung open to us in admiration, what might we be capable of? How might we lose sense of decency, and our own fallibility, and the rights of others?