My Cobblestone Heart

Leave all cell phones
At home
No wireless
     Thumbs

Give me a street of dimpled stones
There I am young.

Let me walk out amongst the
    Apparitions of crinoline
And shawls
Frock coats, top hats
Even further back
   Below monasteries and their walls
With their bells and reliqueries
A winter sigh through the mortuaries
And from the men in cassocks.

What has modernity but given
But disconnect?
An illusion of screens bright and app-flecked
Emoticons for emotions and truncated
Words

Let me feel the length of day
Let me understand what I've heard and read
Before its deleted or Microsoft-filed away.

Sunlight and scenery
No devices to distract from all
God's greenery

And yes, a street with houses of stone and
Smoke-plumed
Chimneys

Where letters inside are treasured and written
In a century where one rarely cares about
Internet memes and adorable kittens.

All this clutter for weak and fidgety minds
I would leave it all without thought and expel a happy sigh

To pour myself into the unwired hours
Smell the sky and wait out the flowers
    To feel time like the pace of my heart
To never need a password to start my phone
(Am I alone in this?)

No broadband nor senseless blogging
No Tweets and online ad flogging

No latest news from somewhere else, nor studies and finds from
Superficial articles
Nor the latest scientific discovery about the binding of some
Unknown atomic particles

To let all be, to let all unfold
To search for a personal truth and enjoy the
    Moment's gold.

Below cornices, below gables walking, below buttresses flying
By roads, by doorways talking, to watch the carriages
Go by riding, to see the horses, beautiful and swift
    Not as ornaments of the snooty and rich.

Truly, and
Yet I know
This nostalgia is slightly romantic, if not slightly
Pedantic,
Yes, I recognizes its flaws

A previous time when and where churches ruled
And people lived uneducated and fooled under the thumb of despotic laws

But for every advance humanity as a supposed-whole makes
     There is still crime, greed and tyranny,
Various kind of abuse and hunger with its misery
And of course, the hand of fate.

Twenty-first century humans still remain
Hypocrites
Buying ethically grown coffee beans
Talking on phones, happy to be seen and met,
(Oh look at Mr. and Mrs. Special talking loudly
In public!)
These phones made by people who attempted suicide
But were saved by sweatshop nets

And these people with their self-satisfaction, worship monsters and follow
Their lead
Ignoring the deeds done and untried
For how can one punish a God-and-family-loving man?
He's a Christian, he'll rape the earth and others wherever he can,
He believes in Jesus and the Economy,
    No unions for him where workers are safe from corporate cruelty

Let oil bleed from below, let water be fracked and undrinkable
But, even so
Question the suit, unthinkable, no
    Who cares if justice cannot ensue
Children are soldiers, drones blacken the
   Ground
With their video game bombs
  That blow up without a sound
On t.v. screens in offices of the wealth, morally unhealthy few.

And all the while, consumers buy more than before, more than their ancestors did, always
Buried in debt
They purchase a fantasy and for awhile, maybe content
Before going on and buying and
Briefly burying themselves in the next.

How is this progress? more a hamster on
 A wheel
The rodent brain runs on
How little it feels.

Only with a tragedy do the blind awaken, the shaking off of slumber
And the sole human, whether in illness or
After a death, must look around and regard the greater wonder.

But for me, to live in this era, this time
     I know I would trade many of its
Insulated comforts
For the sensations that are currently dying

Like thought and imagination
Languages, logic and great conversation

To have friends instead of a book of faces
What good does a technology do
   If it all but replaces
A communion, a community at the market and hearth
To learn music and play and talk amongst others
   Instead of keyboarding in the dark

For this I would give all just to regain
   My cobblestone heart.

Docile in the Presence of The Leopard: A re-reading and appreciation

'You see; you, Bendicò, are a bit like them, like the stars; happily incomprehensible, incapable of producing anxiety.' He raised the dog's head, which was almost invisible in the darkness. 'And then with those eyes of yours at the same level as your nose, with your lack of chin, such a head can't possibly evoke malignant spectres in the sky.'

The more I scan the best seller lists and scan the pages of book sections in the New York Times or the Toronto Star, the less likely I feel compelled to read modern fiction. Non-fiction, more likely but only if it isn't about the Second World War or some facet of American culture like Joe Dimagio or one of the presidents. For me, I love any book with Europe as a backdrop and whether the story is true or not, I don't care, let me relive a 19th century or Fin-de-siecle scene, let me go back to a time when yes the world was less politically correct and the books belonged to a readership that cared about reading and the future of literature as if it was a perennial child worth protecting. 

One could say I am misguided or not mindlessly hip to the latest trends, that I'm not sensitive enough to the rise of minority authors whose voices are beginning to emerge. I won't apologize when I say I don't care about colonialism or Africa. It's not that I'm culturally challenged, it's that I'm not drawn to those stories. I wasn't repressed by a corrupt regime nor was my family enslaved and made to work for King Leopold. I feel compassion for this culture but I'm simply not interested.

Moreover, anything recommended to me by a bookstore CEO or a celebrity strikes me as a conflict of interest. 

It doesn't matter, really, what I think; I'm a small voice and prefer a dwindling, fading interest group. More and more are modern bookshelves being stocked with anything but White European Males. From what I've gathered, the majority of serious fiction is written by scholars and academics and everything else by people who probably watch more television and film that read (which would explain the plots of 90% of popular fiction). 

I am a cynic, an angered one at times but also a docile devotee of the classics and I continue to turn away from the latest literary aggrandizations, books approved by the so-called literary hierarchy, books written by writing students and graduates of MFA programs in favour of books approved by time. I shrug away these authors of the present, their hopeless and naked insistence on their own importance and significance and let the masters entertain and edify me.

And The Leopard is such a book wherein I don't feel like I'm reading but experiencing and entering a more enthralling and honest existence.

Whenever I long for something with a balanced tone of both beauty and melancholy, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's sullen masterpiece is what I think of. I compare his work to the best of Ivan Bunin and Joseph Roth; truly, all three men seemlessly capture the yearning for another era while depicting an opulence of sensations and moods in their literarly worlds. For Bunin, that wistful, pastoral era before the Russian Revolution equipped him with his most sensual of memories. He is the young man in most of his pastoral and erotic stories, hounded by the stirrings of the flesh and ultimately aware of the near-defunct caste system that existed in Tzarist Russian. Roth, an outsider, too managed to cast a shining, late evening, golden shower of light onto his stage where his tragic characters mingle and fall. For most of Roth's figures are men broken because their Empire is buried and gone. They are survivors of wars but unable to co-exist with the emerging values and changes that are more like cancers than cures. 

Though while Bunin and Roth would lead more literary lives, publishing their works throughout the years, Lampedusa wouldn't even live to see his manuscript in a book form. Born in 1896 he only began his masterpiece in 1955. The first complete draft was rejected and he turned to story writing. In 1957 he finished a second draft, the present work but it too was unworthy of the presses. He died of lung cancer in July of the same year. Finally, Lampedusa's wife, through the help of the young Ferrarese writer, Georgio Bassani (author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - 1962) landed a publisher in 1958 and overnight, it became an instant success.

The criticism first leveled at the book before publication is that it was too old-fashioned and unbalanced. In the world after Hiroshima, James Joyce, Frank Kafka, Auschwitz and the bikini, Lampedusa's sombre and pessimistic novel about a Prince (his own great-grandfather) and his family in the changing times of the Risorgimento (Italian Unification) seemed outdated and lacking in significance. Literary writers were supposed to be experimental and avante-garde and here comes this staid and stately perspective on Sicily and Sicilian culture in the 19th century. 

Many of these initial and subsequent critics, however, were unable to conceive of the book's greater, more timeless themes of aging, the challenge to tradition and the longing for the eternal as depicted in the Prince's love of the stars and mathematics. Even the Prince's dog, Bendicò is caught up in the realm of the prestige lifestyle and a quasi-victim in the end. 

The book, thankfully, remains an undisputed classic. It is read as a kind of social history, an essay on Sicily in the mid-1800s but also as a narrative, a tale about one man's way of life giving way to a newer, less-refined one. Though the Prince has male off-spring, he is more attached to his nephew, Tancredi, a soldier in Garibaldi's army. Though he is born aristocratic, the youth's stature is liberal and progressive and the Prince understands and admires, if not sadly, the boy's position. Perhaps he sees a bit of himself in the young man. 

Much of the novel takes place amongst the palaces of Don Fabrizio. In the first chapter we meet his wife and children, the daughters being represented by Concetta who secretly loves Tancredi and yet possesses her father's haughty attitude to the rustic and roughened. Though they are the elite of Sicily they mingle amongst their people  and during one dinner, the Mayor of Donnafugata, Don Calogero Sedarà, born of peasant stock is given the opportunity to present his daughter, Angelica who will charm and eventually marry Tancredi.

The book isn't so much plot-driven but what I would call mood-inspired (much like Bunin's stories). This isn't a page turner with mysteries teasing the reader following the close of each unresolved chapter. Instead, there are scenes and from these moments, the characters reveal themselves and the narrator, Lampedusa reveals his philosophies. At one point, not long after the couple is affianced, the two lovers go wandering through the vast and labyrinth palace of Don Fabrizio's palace in Donnafugata. Though it is autumn, the season is eternal and more like a golden age in which the unaccompanied couple - for they were wise and quick to lose the clueless, French maid - sail through the palace "on a ship made of dark and sunny rooms, of apartments sumptuous or squalid, empty or crammed with remains of heterogeneous furniture". Though the narrator is omniscient, there are tones of the Prince and of Lampedusa. Don Fabrizio, we learn quickly in the first chapter isn't entirely faithful to his wife and though we know the wide-eyed couple is alone, they are depicted as foolish and naive by a prose reflecting the loss of innocence and impending disillusionment. Through these very embittered but tender, narratie eyes, from this opinion, we learn to regard the couple as children and the scenes summarized as such: "Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate veiled gaiety at tall the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail."

There are other great and wondrous telling sentences (Tumeo, a friend of the Prince poetically says of Angelica: 'Her sheets must smell like paradise'). The entire book, if anything is filled with such lines that an intoxicated reader might pause on every page and underline yet another favourite passage or paragraph. It is less a book than a series of portraits and paintings, landscapes and sculptures, vignettes and tableaux. The focus, though, isn't entirely on the Prince. At one point we travel with the Jesuit, Father Pirrone to his hometown where he saves his niece from being disowned by her brother-n-law. In these moments, Lampedusa depicts the Sicilian peasantry as fixed on acquisition and pride. Though they are strangers to the upper echelons, the noble feasts and gatherings they share with their favoured contemporaries a nefarious penchant for possession. 

I suppose what I love best about the book is this ease, this sprezzatura, if you will in which Lampedusa has written his masterpiece. Sprezzatura is, naturally, of Italian origin and first coined by Baldassare Castligone in his Book of the Courtier (there is an excellent non-fiction book aptly entitled Sprezzatura written by Peter D'Epiro that describes 50 Italians and their genius - Lampedusa is 48 on the list) The definition of the word suggests a 'nonchalant' approach to one's own art, as if its creation came without effort. Lampedusa isn't so much an author but a kind of presence and his sentences and the pace of his book have a realism to them that is sensual and yet intellectual. Like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary is something Lampedusa also had done; he has taken his snap shots and has painted this long ago era with a humanistic brush. He doesn't skimp on the uncomfortable truth, nor does he embody his characters with unnatural virtues. I love that he isn't kind but he isn't exactly critical for the sake of criticism. He knows the truth is shunned and opens the battered door, revealing what others would like to see draped in majesty and regal hues and instead shows the decay: the soldier's body in the garden with his intestines nakedly spilling out, the unshaven faces of the mayor and his awkward evening dress, and the stuffed body of the family dog soon to be thrown out with the trash. There are edges and they rightly remain revealed. 

Lampedusa refuses to make his book a happy one nor is it completely pessimistic. I would say it is neither joyful nor sad but a rightful, amenable approach to narrative and prose in that it avoids labels and exists for the sake of the life's curiosity and satisfaction. What one arrives at and what one takes from the book is wholly personal.

Maybe I revere this anti-establishment approach. The book is anything but trendy or approved by a six or seven-figure salaried personality. It is that rare beauty, the obstinate, anti-James Joyce novel, a book written not for art's sake but for the human sake, to remind the head-in-sand reader that all glitters doesn't remain gold nor was it always golden. It casts a pall, like a rain storm on a sunny, summery beach where one can find another beach reader with their chick lit - another trade paper back with a sparkly, cartoon cover or one showing photo-shopped tanned legs and a paper shopping bag. This wasn't a book written with movie rights in mind (though there is an excellent film directed by Visconti). No, it is a challenging read because it doesn't so much invite the reader - no, The Leopard, despite the elegant prose seems to tolerate the intruder moving slowly through the pages (it is always funny to think that the anti-hero you are reading about wouldn't even welcome you into his own home, let alone deign to shake your hand; I imagine Don Fabrizio more or less welcoming anyone with a rifle as if they were a pheasant). Lampedusa's tome reminds me of the Spinoza line: All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. Such a statement, one would think, exists solely for books like this.

I am a bit of a book snob. Guilty. Yet only because so few people care about literature. Lampedusa is the genius of the past century and I would take a chapter in his book over twenty bestseller lists approved by Twitterized critics. His writing humbles me and that is the true mission of great literature.

Goodbye Facebook

(Told to the rhythm of Goodnight Moon)

In my grey room there is a grey cell phone
And a laptop
With a 'delete account' on screen.

And above
On my shelves and in different nooks, one can see
Many kinds of books
Novels, biographies, philosophies, tomes
With poems inside

Much better things for the mind....

Goodbye, Facebook

Goodbye, Facebook, with all the superficial friends
Goodbye, postings of cute kittens and
Other people's children that never seem to end.

Goodbye, blue band and timeline
Goodbye, 'like' feature that seems quite asinine. 

Goodbye, profile with pictures and tags
Goodbye, feed that sometimes tediously, ridiculously lags.

Goodbye, so-called 'Privacy' and of course, the NSA
Goodbye, Obama, probably looking into my profile today.

Goodbye, Nasdaq
Goodbye, Zuckerberg, perhaps CIA-backed.

Goodbye, Facebook;

Goodbye, envy and dismay
Goodbye ,wasted hours, lonely hours
Creeping other 'friends' today.

Goodbye, contacts who have nothing better to do
Than self-congratulates themselves
With a photo of their day or two

Or things they did, or share some platitude or New Age quote
Nothing that gives you hope
But still, how sad.

Goodbye to all the self-basking,
To the on-line masking
That makes one weary and yet mad. 

Goodbye, bland comments,
Goodbye, marketing ads
Goodbye to this trend
That now includes moms and granddads.

Goodbye, yes, to all the updates
That never really mattered

Goodbye to all the people
Across the years once collected
Now scattered.

Goodbye to the hope that I can reclaim
Time
Goodbye, Facebook
And hopefully your site's decline.

Goodbye, Facebook
My world will hopefully be richer now

When I hit this 'delete' button
And go on with my life somehow.

Goodbye, Facebook
Goodbye.
 

Reading the Now Sullen and Sometimes Cynical Art

Everyday we should... read one good poem - Goethe

Lately I've come to terms that I don't read as much as I used to. When I was in high school, I never told anyone that during my afternoon spare, I walked home with the sole purpose of finishing a John Steinbeck or F.Scott Fitzgerald novel. I never told anyone about my secret past-time. No, I said I was going home to watch t.v. and sleep. I still remember how well that lie worked because during class, my art teacher chided me with the very lie I had concocted. For me, reading was part of my alter-ego and I existed in the Clark Kent disguise.  Reading was my private greater life and I kept it so. Sacred, simple, untouched, unhindered, beautiful and not once revealed to the prying eyes of others. 

Looking back, I could have told her my secret. No, I didn't sleep, I wasn't lazy enough to sit in front of the boob tube - no, instead, I devoured words and ruminated and felt alive, more alive that I did in school which for me was several hours of anxiety until two o'clock. And then a pensive walk home and then an hour with words.

Then I could read fifty pages in a sitting. I needed a break after those fifty pages. A half-hour, an hour and then back at it again.

Nowadays, it seems I read fifty pages in the morning and don't return to the book I am reading until the next day.

Maybe I'm cynical or tired or simply frustrated. I don't know. All of the above? Yes, perhaps, alright, that could be. Yet, I pick up a book more because it is habit and less that it feels like pleasure and discovery. When I was in my early teens, then late teens and early twenties, a book held out a complex snippet of the universe and greedily, like a child at a boring adult party, grasped for my delicious cookie and savoured it amidst the adult world where sobriety has been dulled away by quiet alcoholic buzzes. A book back then was the best friend, a partner in crime, a treat, a refuge, a longing briefly fulfilled.

Now a book is more like a chore and I hate this. Maybe I've come to the end of my reading or maybe I don't want to re-read. I know people who read and re-read their favourite books every year. A friend told me about a teacher who re-read In Search of Lost Time every summer, all seven volumes. Sure, I loved Proust and I know he had a wondrous influence on me but I don't feel compelled to revisit Swan or the Germantes or even Charlus again. Maybe in ten years times when everything else matter less or more, maybe then I'll return to the author of the cork-lined room and remember what he remembered all over again.

I wish I could return to certain books but the territory becomes familiar and familiarity sometimes, as the Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Mansfield Park, the Poetry of Hölderlin, House of the Dead, Nana, The Divine Comedy,  etc... I am more than willing to re-indulge because I don't know what else is out there.

saying goes, breeds or better yet, belies contempt. I have a list of books to re-read.

One might notice I'd rather be aroused by the classic and re-animate them with another reading. Yes, they are classics. I think more than anything I am cynical because there seems to be less good writing in books than years ago. All the good writers living are working for television and film. I feel this very much. If anything, there has been a reversal. The best seller list is drivel but turn on the t.v., watch AMC, HBO or FX and you'll find something literary and exciting.

I don't want to bother with modern writers. I've tried. I have and found few rewards. Yes, I read Julian Barnes latest (The Sense of an Ending) and read practically all of Tom Perotta (Little Children, Election, The Leftovers) and now I search for others.

But the mission is faltering. There's nothing quite, yes, nothing quite like Six Feet Under or Mad Men or Downton Abbey. If anything, I am reading the great British novelist Anthony Trollope basically because he inspired Jullian Fellowes (and Trollope is amazing and I'm happy but still... always the classics).

I could blame television or I could blame film or I could blame the MFA programs in university for coddling the lazy talent of academics. I tried reading The Tiger's Wife but found the first few pages lacking. I remember a scene where a man's arm is caught in the jaws of a tiger and all I kept thinking, if you work in a zoo and near a tiger cage, wouldn't you be more cautious? Details like this make me think the author had the right contacts and not a great ability to craft a believable tale.

And that's just it, the art of writing like the art of reading has fallen flat on its face. I pick up the odd literary journal and I don't have the patience for the latest pretentiousness. Some poet or story writer that is hackneyed and boring, who hasn't worked a day in their life, pushing a pen in their ivory tower, his or her view of the world blinded by a penchant for Marxism or Feminism.

But then it could be the audience. Technology hypnotizes and the latest gadget gobbles up time, a piece of China-made hardware, built by someone who tried to kill themselves but the nets outside the building caught them in the act. But yes, there it is, the pocket-sized distraction that isn't a piece of one's anatomy. What good are these devices, just mere tools of distractions, conveniences that are inconvenient, dumbing down buyers. I can't count the number of times I've been in a social situation where in the midst of mundane conversation, the people present pulled out their device and began to text. Why bother being with people if you feel this callous need to ignore them? Of course, these people are not reading. No, they're busy playing Angry Birds or tweeting the latest inane thought they've had. Instead of participating in something worthwhile, getting lost in literature, they are busy letting the rest of the world inhabit their mental space and everything out there, as I've happened to find is equally idiotic.

So reading, yes, is a lost, losing art. A book? What's that? A thing with paper and a covers? Don't judge a book by it's cover? How long will that phrase make sense?

Still, I don't know what to say or what has come over me. I long for a good book, something seminal and touching, emotional and philosophical. Instead, it's the same putrid chicken feed on the bestseller list. Always a cookbook, a diet book, a political-propaganda book in the non-fiction list along with something about 'heaven' or some Muslim woman surviving or embracing her culture. Turn to the fiction side and it's a host of plot-driven tomes - mysteries, actions, Dan Brown - with little depth and the same spurning need to turn the page because curiosity is a great motivator. You can write badly but if you've captured people's reptilian-brain interest, you've got them. Sex, death, corruption... fill in the blanks, add a few personalities and the New York Times will want you.

I'll return to my Trollope (an island of heaven in my skepticism) soon but in the meanwhile I sigh for my high school self, so eager and so much longing to live in that other world. High school didn't matter and I'm sure all my former adolescent peers are addicted to their Facebooks, posting pictures of their latest off-spring, talking about what they digested at last night's dinner or adding yet another funny picture of a kitten. Why is it in this world of technology, people devolve and not evolve? Now are the primitive times I think and reading is dying with the rise of the banal and mediocre. Distraction, not edification. Blindness and not awareness. As a whole, the Western world doesn't even have the wherewithal to see how ridiculous we are with our lives. Stupidity continues to win and the passive mind is rewarded. I love good television but when will good reading return and when it will be easier to find the book that will help me lose myself and still feel connected to the better aspect of the modern world?

Absent Fathers: An Interpretation of AMC's Mad Men

I do feel we are living in the Golden Age of television. It used to be that movies stars with failing careers seemed to traipse into obscurity after a desperate stint on a sub-par mini-series or sitcom. Now it is the opposite. Who cares about the movies when you have great television to watch and discuss? Summer blockbusters? Just more explosions and mindless action from the latest super hero film (cough, cough, Cghh-Man-of-Stcough...)

Yes, if you look back over the last decade you can see the increase in good writing devoted to drama and the like. Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey and so forth. Even How I Met Your Mother is brilliant.

And I'd never thought I would be discussing television shows the way I have discussed novels or poems, let alone independent films. Perhaps I can see the influences of literature on t.v. For instance, I learned Jullian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame is a lover of Anthony Trollope and if you read the latter's works you'll see his distinct influence on the scripts penned by Fellowes. At one point in the first season, a character at the dinner table recalls the day's hunt and likens it to an episode in a Trollope novel.

If you watch Six Feet Under, you'll know Alan Ball of American Beauty took the dysfunction of the famed film and translated it for the smaller screen, incorporating psychology, philosophy (the Bhavagad-Gita is referenced in the second season), and art. 

But another factor I happen to love is the element of complexity. Downton is not only poetry, first on the page, then spoken but it is a world filled with characters that have varying dimensions. There is depth to this estate of upstairs and downstairs and one can only wonder what the fourth series will bring come 2014 (those in Britain will get the scoop in the fall when the show is resumed in September).

And then there's another of my favourites: Mad Men. One can look no farther than the flawed but charming Don Draper. When I had a chance to watch the first episode of the very first season I regarded the ending shot as a kind of voyeuristic glimpse into the troubled life of the ad man. Here we see the man, the everyman at the end of his day. He's just spoken to his wife, his Betty, the suburbanite blonde beauty played by January Jones who has sleepily turned on the bedside lamp to say she called the office and there is a plate in the oven. Her voice is soft and home-maker perfect but it too hides something desperate and woeful. Next, the everyman is on the stairs. We see his black socks on the floorboards. And then through a doorway. Yes, we discover, he is the father, a son and daughter, his hands now on their sleeping heads. Now the wife appears behind him, lovingly looking, dressed in her negligee, and we are pulled away from this tableaux which resembles a sullen scene in a Hopper painting, pulled out the window, out into the street listening to Vic Damone's rendition of 'On The Street Where You Live'. 

We the viewers fall in love with Don the way audiences of Ancient Greece fell in love with the legends of their culture on stage. They had Agamemnon and Oedipus, broken heroes, men with pasts and sordid histories and so too, do we learn of Draper's past - he isn't who he says he is. We discover who he is, it would seem at the same pace as he learns to accept his earlier lot in his life. He's another man from another life but his costume is his security, his meal ticket. The orphan grown-up was raised in a whore house. His father was killed when he was very young and his mother died in childbirth. We catch vignettes of this past throughout the show, moments crafted tenderly as if written by a John Steinbeck or Jack London. 

And yet that haunting first scene. In a sense, before that scene we are watching the mysterious father in his absence. We learn about his infidelity and his drinking at work but also his brilliance, his ability to think and then talk. We enjoy this. He's not a charlatan but a kind of magician, an illusionist. He is a father figure last and a business man and lover first. The show's drama, its tension and ultimate entertainment depends on him being the absent father. I often feel a wince of guilt or even a melodramatic moment of melancholy when I think of that ending scene. We the audience participate in this need for Draper for he is too fascinating a character just to be normal. We are hooked. We are the jilted lover, the lover not called. We call back and we keep coming back.

And yet the absent father. Whether this is intentional or not, I don't know but yet I scan the list of characters. Betty's father soon dies once we are introduced to him but there is some hints he was sexually abusive. Then there's Peggy, the secretary-turned-prodigy whose family consists of a mother and sister in Brooklyn. Don is a kind of pseudo-father figure but this is quickly remedied and we recognize Draper to be a twisted mentor. 

Joan, played by the ravishing redhead, Christina Hendrick's is equally fatherless. She has a child out of wedlock and the father figure soon becomes absent. Roger, one of the head partners of the ad agency is the biological father though Joan wants her son to believe her little boy's dad is an army doctor.

Roger is a pathetic father figure in his own way. We know his father started the ad agency but he's dead now. Roger, like Don has his extra-marital escapades and his daughter learns of daddy's dark side. But what is Roger to do? He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and in many ways, we only respect him because he went off to war. He ruins two marriages and yet manages to glide on and on, escaping heart problems and living life in the only way he can - single.

Then there's Pete Campbell who impregnates Peggy in the first season. He's about to be married but just needs something wild. His dad never approved of him and dies in a plane crash. As for his child, he doesn't find out until later about the baby and the adoption. Then, after a few seasons, when he finally gets caught cheating with the neighbour's wife, he becomes the father figure in the city. No, he doesn't have to commute anymore but he's essentially homeless and without any guiding paternal star. Even his own father-n-law whores around. 

I would say this existential absence casts a fascinating pall over the show. Sometimes I find myself asking, who really are the grown-ups? Considering the majority of the events in the show centre around major historical events in the 1960s - Kennedy and Martin Luther King's assassination being the two predominant ones - we, the audience get this feeling both of freedom and of fear. Even even if we reflect on the two seminal deaths, two great men, two father figures are killed. And in their absence, a wake of chaos and crisis. 

Yes, it is the sixties in Mad Men and yes, there is sexual freedom, sexual license; still the world still clocks in and out and people lead their lives. I wonder if Andrew Weiner is hinting at how corrupt and distrustful a patriarchy is without paternal guidance. The fatherless world created the sixties, you might surmise. How sad but how real, and how in-depth such a reality is when given to the best people to write about. It is the sixties, however, we must remember that started the Civil Right's Movement and Feminism. The fatherless patriarchy created something awe-inspiring because the absence, the nothingness motivated them to search. Religion wasn't working so the secularized world had to turn to themselves, their lives; from this, answers to the social cancers and sores began to emerge underneath the surface of those complacent and joyful ads. 

I always find it fascinating when I think how many of the original and successful ad men of the post-War generation were sons of pastors and preachers. In the popular culture books of James B.Twitchell, the English and advertising professor at the University of Florida reminds his readers that the original formula for a successful advertisement came via Christianity. The trick was to replace Jesus with the product and the problem of sin with the problem of necessity. Bad breath (halitosis - Latin for bad breath) doesn't require the messiah but Listerine, for instance. You need a lawn mower? Well, there's John Deere.

Also Twitchell comments that when people drink Corona, they are not drinking a beer (or cerveza) but the idea of Mexico. People, moreover, when they get into a luxury car are not driving the automobile but the ad and the mythos behind it. They feel powerful when they turn on the engine. But not because of the car itself, the tactile one they are touching. No. They feel disturbingly strong because of the illusion they cherish when they press down on the pedal. The fantasies, the ads, whether on television or in newspapers have already fueled the madness. And men like Don Draper know this. The name 'Draper' says it all. A man who screens, covers and obstructs. His work is to tell the right story, weave up the right fantasy. Because hey, we learn from the get go, from the very first episode of the award-winning show, all cigarettes are alike, they are all toasted but when you advertise the obvious and make it a novelty, calling Lucky Strikes 'toasted', you launch into the mystique and confounding.

Advertising, like religion truly plays on people's insecurities and their need for palatable stories. Both inflict their listeners with longings and doubts about alternatives and then sells the dream. Both offer empty promises and many people, both those suckered by the lure of the marketing or the 'message' feel it incumbent on themselves to spread the message. Tell me the difference between someone who buys a pair of Nikes and someone who has 'found' Jesus? In a way, the self is pushed aside in both scenarios to have something foreign persuade you you are nothing without it.

What is interesting to note is that in the Gospels, God is the absent father. When Jesus is on the cross, he asks "why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Forsaken, abandoned... the absence of an all-loving father appears here though in Christianity, one would like to believe He loves us. 

Returning to Mad Men, near the end of season 2 we find Don in California. He's returned to a maternal figure, Anna who has helped keep his secret safe. As if being baptized, Don walks along the beach and then into the surf, arms up, the foam rushing against his chest, his shirt soaking, his pants drenched. George Jone's earlier version of 'Cup of Loneliness' is cued and we see the ironic pilgrim on his baffled way to identity. Even here, the audience, still in love wonders when the troubled soul will find his road of salvation to self-acceptance, to becoming the father that never fathered him. 

'Idle no more' in a Society of Idleness and Consensus

Canadians are being divided and are weakened by this division.

It is no surprise that a divided nation is weak.We Canadians are not seeing the bigger picture anymore and are instead made to focus in on the petty. Well, we apparently relish in it. We have been inundated with Reality Television, squabbles between petty characters, emotionally saturated with the puerile to the point we no longer know what is going on in our own backyard.

Bill C-45 is going on and ask anyone on the street, at work, at church what that Bill means, they'll probably reply with  negative and often racist comments about the aboriginal people fighting it. They might comment on the native's inability to manage money following Therese Spence's audit. 

How hypocritical we are as a country when we look to the south and see the racism of Americans without seeing our racism and at the same time our own ignorance. What is bill C-45? Ask someone you know. If you don't know and they don't know, shouldn't that scare you more. Shouldn't you be concerned when newspapers try to discredit a person when they are taking a stand? Shouldn't that make you question things? It is one thing to fire criticism at a person, it is another to ignore what the other monkeys are doing and start thinking for yourself.

There was the Oka Crisis back in 1990 and racism came out then. Does anyone remember what that was about? It was about a land dispute. 

In this issue, this 'Idle no More', we also have land in question.

Bill C-45 has overhauled the Navigable Waters Protection Act (NWPA) of 1882, renaming it the Navigation Protection Act (NPA). The former mandated approval and consultation of any kind of construction in or around a water way. Under the latter, there is more room for approval for development along a circumscribed list of waterways set by the Minster of Transportation. 

Certain waterways flow through native land. 'Development' means change but what kind of change?

The NWPA has restricted development and of course, environmental damage and destruction. 

With the NPA and Bill C-45, that could change and not only native land but Canadian land could be destroyed due to corporations and cronies of our Prime Minister. 

But no, no, no, we focus on Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. The audit, her inability to lose weight. All these things show up in the comments below on-line columns and news reports. What is wrong with us? Are we so low as to resort to high school taunting and bullying approaches? This woman is fighting for Canada and her people, not just one or the other. 

But we defend our stupidity. We read newspapers and rally to our idiot boxes and office coolers, making snide lazy comments instead of writing to our MPs and asking questions. We are so ridiculous we believe we have crafted opinions using our own minds when the Canadian brain is becoming the most polluted resource in the northern hemisphere. Fed on a diet of television and junk food magazines, most Canadians are as aware of what is going on in their countries as the average American. 

I have certainly read the criticism and tried to investigate the other side but I have to ask - why the audit? If Chief Spence was in the wrong, if she is making a fool of herself, then there would be no need to bring that up. This was an obvious tactic, one of 'pointing the finger' back. If the government believed they were doing the noble thing, why would they have the newspapers dig up such an issue. Mismanagement of money? Canadian politics is rife with that, Liberals and Conservative governments alike have wasted our money. 

But when it came to Prime Minister Chretien, he had CEOs pay their own way on trips to Europe, Asia and South America. February of last year, Harper and 30 CEOs were entertained in China. Who fit the bill for each one of these CEOs? We, idle and complacent Canadians, of course.

I am afraid of this country because of the arrogance, the racism and moreover, the absolute complacency involved in this consensus of idleness and petty criticism. The Canadian majority don't know that they insult their own selves by remaining unaware. They insult themselves by repeating the reports they've heard or read instead of forming thoughts for themselves. They are decided because they adhere to a certain party. That is just as ludicrous as saying 'I follow because I am told'. There is no deductive reasoning going on in this country. There is no investigation by everyday people. Not at all. They are brainwashed and their lashing out is the tell-tale sign. They rally to the executioner, they prefer Stalin without realizing one day Stalin will attack them.

Anyway... isn't anyone going to ask why Harper went to China? Why did Harper go to China? Well China basically owns part of the tar sands in Alberta. In 2011 China's CNOOC acquired the bankrupt OPTI Canada. OPTI's "main asset was a 35 percent working interest in Nexen's Long Lake oil sands project," according to Jennifer A. Dlouhey of the Houston Chronicle. 

Those who criticize 'Idle no More' without asking questions themselves should look at the Tar Sands in Alberta. Please also see the link to the Destructive Canadian Oil Sands

For those who are parents and grandparents, this is not the time to get lost in the mundane. The aboriginal culture believes they are guardians of the land whereas the the White European Legacy has always been take and destroy. The land is theirs to take and pillage.

Who do we side with? In the Bible it says 'love thy neighbor.' There is no specifications. The neighbour doesn't have to be a certain way. This land never belonged to anyone. We are here to live and live wisely. The neighbour is everyone as Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard notes in his Works of Love. And our neighbor is sitting on land that was designated for them. Land that is in trouble of being contaminated. Land that is part of Canada. This country.

54,000 square miles of land have been ruined in this country. That is a quarter of Alberta. What's next? Northern Ontario? Saskatchewan? Doesn't matter because there will be jobs. Of course, the economy. The economy. Our kids and grandkids can deal with the mess. Let's watch the movie Wall-E and not even consider that a possible future for this country.

But no, let's be racist and say terrible things about people that are standing up for this country. Our Prime Minister is selling Canada out but many still defend him because they voted for him. Just because you voted for him, you swore allegiance to him. He is human and makes mistakes. Harper isn't Canada. We are.

To me, this is not an issue of Liberal, NDP or Conservative. This is an issue concerning a country that is being destroyed on a vast scale. The environment is important. In Germany, there are wind farms and houses are blanketed with solar panels. We could do that here without jeopardizing our soil and our waterways and dishonoring our relationships with the aboriginals.

To some extent, I feel it is too late and write not to the choir but to those of the motley crowd who have traded away their thinking. I am writing to my MP. I am asking him questions. Are you concerned at all? Why do you trust what you are told? Why do you want to insult and sully yourselves by being racist and complacent about an important issue? Pick up the pen. Type out a simple letter. Start somewhere. I am trying to. I'm nauseated by all this destruction I am beginning to see. I think of a tool box sticker in a shop: "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention."

Death and the Author: Moments Before Crossing the Bar

Bin Freund, und komme nicht, zu strafen
(I am friend and I come not to harm).
- Matthias Claudius

Sometimes when I have a glass of rye, I reflect on Dylan Thomas last words: "I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record." 

A poet who turned to alcohol because he believed the muse lay in the malts as opposed to his own unconscious, Thomas went inebriated into that good night. 

As for Balzac, he might as well have run coffee through an I.V. as I'm sure he had more than eighteen straight coffees per day - and probably did have the record. 

Or maybe it wasn't the caffeine that did him in, more like the grueling work schedule he gave himself, his long uninterrupted hours of writing. The man accrued countless debts and just after he was married, the grave became his second honeymoon. I wonder if his leg was twitching like an espresso-holic at the end.

Zola, influenced by Balzac died of carbon monoxide poisoning, said to be caused by a blocked chimney. Though he was a scandalous naturalist writer, author of the Rougon-Macquart series and other works, he made a lot more enemies by defending the Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer sentenced to prison on Devil's Island for giving French military secrets to the Germans. There was some suspicion of foul play concerning the chimney though no one was found or arrested.

Maupassant, protégé of Zola, author of Bel-Ami and the infamous 'Boule de Suif' went mad and managed to capture his experience in 'Le Horla' before dying in an asylum in 1893.

Madness brought on syphilis was very common in the 19th century. And death was a way out, easier than living. 

Though it is interesting to note that both Keats and Schopenhauer are believed to have had the venereal disease, the former died of tuberculosis and the latter of heart failure. Two very different men but they were both quite apprehensive around women and though Keats wrote poetry and loved Fanny Brawne, he did have his time with whores as did Schopenhauer. Whereas the poet wrote with subtle misogyny, the philosopher dedicated essays to his hatred of the opposite sex. He couldn't stand their gossip and chattering and even threw a cleaning woman down the stairs because of the sound of her voice. Though he looked down upon the fairer sex, one thing he did give them was their ability to empathize. In "Dignity of Women" (Würde de Frauen) he wrote they are "more sympathetic to the suffering of others."

Schopenhauer influenced Maupassant and Friedrich Nietzsche who may have taken the torch of misogyny from the pessimist and imparted it into his own writing. Nietzsche too had sympathy, he just probably didn't want to admit to it and before he collapsed into madness threw his arms around a horse being flogged in the streets of Turin, Italy in 1889. It seemed in that moment strange and profound that Nietzsche who held a kind of disdain for compassion should succumb to it.

The madness was brought on by the same venereal disease as the French short-story writer. 

Nietzsche lived on some ten more years before dying in 1900. 

Another German, poet Friedrich Hölderlin was madder for a long time before passing on, living 36 years in a tower overlooking the Neckar River in Schwabia, present day Baden-Württtemberg (you can actually visit this tower in Tübingen).

Hölderlin was destined for greatness, a classmate of the philosophers Hegel and Schelling in Tübingener Stift, a hall of residence and teaching in the university town. But he was troubled. Of delicate mind and constitution, a bit of a hypochondriac - well, severe is a better adjective. A restless mind, he was a tutor and lived in Frankfurt and returned home on foot from Paris in 1802 after spending time there and before that, Bordeaux. Perhaps he had to leave the country in 1800, first going to Switzerland than France for had he fallen in love with a married woman, Suzette Gontard (née Borkenstein) several years before. When he arrived home in Nürtigen, he learned not along after that she died. 

Syphilis wasn't the cause of Hölderlin's madness. No, he was accused of being a co-conspirator with the French. His relations were also pretty bad with his family and as a result, he became unfit to stand trial or merely survive. A cultured carpenter, a fan of his writings took him and the family took care of him until his dying day. 

Though one wonders what he could have produced had he remained sane. Was the madness a form of self-protection and death a final absolution? How does one deal with the death of the beloved and unfounded charges coming around one at the same time? Without a supportive family, what is there? The grief and the fear together must have caused him to shut down and he lived on as a ghost. Still, for those lovers of German literature, he had produced some of the most brilliant works of poetry that have influenced men such as the controversial philosopher Martin Heidegger and the poets Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke. 

Trakl too died, one might argue from madness. He was always a bit unstable. When philosopher and wealthy man Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a poetry award for two outstanding poets, it was given to Trakl and Rilke. All they had to do was walk into a bank to procure their funds. Trakl couldn't even do that. 

He worked as a pharmacist and on the Eastern Front, suffered emotionally and mentally by attending wounded soldiers in a barn near Grodek where the Austrian were badly routed. Ninety men under his care and he wasn't a doctor. One of the wounded, unable to cope with his horrendous pain shot himself in the head. Trakl saw the blood and brain and other bits on the wall and rushed out in a frenzied state of shock to only be greeted by the sight of rotting corpses hanging in the trees - local peasants tried and executed due to being disloyal to the Austrians.

His psyche couldn't handle it and after overdose an cocaine, he fell into a coma, dying in Krakow in 1914.

As for Rilke, there is the myth that the thorn of a rose was his undoing. Roses were especially important to the poet. So of course the story of the unhealed thorn-pricked finger leading to his death would hold more sway over the facts. He died of leukemia. It was a painful and unpleasant but quick death and he passed on in late December 1926.

Poets themselves are often drawn to the mystical in life, to death. Ceasar Vallejo wrote a poem predicting he would die in Paris when it was raining. He did die in Paris. I don't know if it was raining.

But then how to explain the prophecy of Mark Twain who said he arrived in the year of Halley's Comet, 1835 and that he would pass on with the comet upon its return, stressing he would be very disappointed with himself and existence if this wasn't the case.

Well, he wasn't disappointed. I'm sure in some way he stubbornly and unconsciously insisted on this grand exit. Ibsen too was insistent. The Norwegian playwright suffered a series of strokes and the day before he died, a nurse quietly assured a visitor he was improving. "On the contrary" ("Tvertimod!") Ibsen balked loudly and defiantly from his bed and that was the last thing he uttered before his death twenty-four hours later.

Of course, there are suicides when one thinks of creative people. John Berryman threw himself off a bridge while Hart Crane is said to have jumped overboard on a steamship not too long after being beaten up for coming on to a male crew member. Berryman's body met the Mississippi River and Hart's the Gulf of Mexico.

Anne Sexton killed herself and Sylvia Plath (can't forget her), head right into the oven, the kitchen filling with gas.

The most famous author suicide is  Ernest Hemmingway. Boss Shotgun, barrel in his mouth and the trigger went click.

Normally I am sympathetic to suicides but with the latter, I can't take him seriously. In my eyes he was a fraud. A gifted writer and adventurer, I read my way through Hemmingway in my teens. Though here was this bare-knuckler bruiser of a man who hunted in Africa and was war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, I feel he is more a shadow than a human being. I'm sure he experienced a lot of life but I really don't care for him. Like Picasso, he was exaggerated by his own self-estimation and ridiculous bravado. To this day, many writing students laud him. I tried to re-read some of his writing in my late twenties only to find his work empty and lacking in philosophy. His work often reminds me of a table once decorated with savoury dishes but all we have left is the aroma and the remaining crumbs. (To be honest, I feel as much sympathy for him as I do for Napoleon.)

I'd rather read Paul Celan or Primo Levi, two men who were at concentration camps during the Second World War. Neither was a thrill seeker, in fact Levi was a chemist when the war started. Whereas the poet Celan is dark he is undoubtedly human and Levi, well he has the voice of a man trying to survive, both conflicted and warm, someone with atrocities imprinted in his soul. Though Celan, author of 'Death Fugue',  threw himself into the Seine in Paris and Levi threw himself down the stairs in Turin. They escape the gas chamber and the ovens only to die after they had been killed emotionally by the war.

Turin though... the city where Nietzsche collapsed into madness. How it all comes around, how everything is interconnected for the philosopher's sister Elizabeth, a noted anti-semitic and supporter of the Nazi party continued the Nietzsche legacy by setting up the Nietzsche Archive. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the archive was given funding. Hitler even attended Elizabeth's funeral.

One can't blame Nietzsche for Hitler the way it would be absurd to blame a thorn for a poet's death. Hitler didn't read the philosopher in-depth and only quoted him superficially in Mein Kampf.

Still, life is interesting. Heidegger, whom I mentioned above, was a Nazi for a spell and following the war, wasn't allowed to teach. His influence is unquestionable. He gave a famous interview in Der Spiegel magazine and then died peacefully in 1976, buried beside his brother and parents in his birthplace and hometown of Messkirch, Baden. Full circle, from birth to death.

Heidegger, a fairly painless death unlike many of those mentioned today.