Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Three

     My Favourite Painters Part One.


     Elaine Risley never existed. Yet she's one of my favourite painters.
     She's painted a landscape of a lake where adults are making lunch. Near the paintings's lower end, there are logos from out-of-date gas pumps. Then Elaine Risley did a portrait of two women and one man from the artist's past. And then there's another painting called 'Unified Field Theory' Here a woman dressed in a long black dress, clutches in her hands a glowing blue glassy object while she hovers in the air above a bridge and trees.
    These three paintings and a fourth one I haven't mentioned  don't exist outside of Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel 'Cat's Eye'. "They have been influenced," says Atwood, "by visual artists like Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, Charles Pachter" and others. The last painting of the hovering woman sort of exists. It was painted by Fred Marcellino for the book cover of Atwood's novel.
     Margaret Atwood is Canada's most famous novelist. She has written millions of words that have been channeled into poetry, novels, book reviews, librettos, and children's books. "Cat's Eye', to no one's surprise, climbed to the top of the best seller's list in 1988.
     In this novel Atwood tells the story of Elaine Risley who now lives in Vancouver. In middle age when the novel opens she's revisiting Toronto where she first lived. There's a retrospective of her work that will be shown in a Toronto gallery. Risley comes back also to confront the ghost of Cordelia, the woman who bullied her horribly when she and Cordelia were children. The novel shuttles back and forth from past to present, from the rough scrappy Canada of the 1940's ands 1950's to the glitzy world of the 1980's.
   'Cordelia' of course, is the name of the only decent daughter of King Lear in Shakespeare's play 'King Lear'. Yet Atwood's Cordelia is a frightful person who nearly gets the young Elaine Risley drowned. Risley by the way calls herself ' a painter' and not a visual artist. In 'Cat's Eye' Atwood confronts various myths and shreds them whole. Many people for instance, see children as innocent beings. Yet Cordelia and her two young allies, Carol and Grace are brutal verbal abusers at age nine and later.
   Nor does Risley have any time for feminists. Feminists have sometimes claimed Atwood as one of their own. Others have sometimes demonized men and held up women as innocent victims of a male dominated world.  Again Atwood tears apart these ideas too. "Women collect grievances" Risley observes. "They hold grudges and change shape. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived or trusted."
     The twice married Risley steps away from feminist groups who surface in 1970's Vancouver. "I avoid gatherings of these women," she says, "walking s I do. I know I am unorthodox, hopelessly heterosexual, a mother, a quisling and a secret wimp." I like Elaine Risley and would admire her art described in the book,. She's a scrapper who gets into a row with her first husband and once throws a radio at him. She's slightly paranoid at times, and like many Atwood characters she takes verbal pot shots at creative people. Also like Atwood she works incredibly hard.
    'Cat's Eye' is a great book that takes its title I think from a marble that Elaine's dead brother once owned. Elaine Risley may never have lived yet she's one of my favourtie painters.

Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe

    My Dad and Me: Part One of Chapter Three.


     Everything my father was, I wasn't. Yet in the end we were alike.
    My father was a short intense working class Londoner who ran after the rich. I ended up many times working with the poorest of the poor. My father couldn't save a penny. I became a real cheapskate.
    "Jaffe, you're so cheap it's terrible," one woman who I liked told me. "You never spend a penny."
     My dad was one of the hardest working people I ever knew. He worked from the age of 13 till he retired at 78. I, in contrast was a complete slacker. I've worked  a grand total of 11 years out of 75.
      "Never take the dole," he'd say. "The dole" is the English expression for welfare. "Never buy second hand clothing or handle old newspapers." I broke all of his rules. I lived on welfare for years on end after becoming disabled. I routinely go to thrift stores and Salvation Army places to buy second hand clothing, books and furniture. I still fish day old newspapers out of blue recycling bins. All of this saved me a fortune.
    Then again my father was a family man who married and had three children - myself and two daughters. I never married. As far as religion goes here again we went in  two diametrically opposed directions. My father was an orthodox Jew whose religion bristled with harsh rules and regulations. I became a liberal Christian who still goes to church and loves to sing hymns.
    My dad was a very good athlete. I was hopeless at sports save for swimming. My father never learned to swim. My father loved to gobble down thick juicy steaks. I became a vegan and rarely eat any animal food save sometimes for butter.
 So put my father and I together and you have two complete opposites. Yet in many ways we were two carbon copies. Both of us were loud, intense, aggressive and sometimes comical laughingstocks and disrupters of the worlds we moved through.
   "Oh here comes Dave Jaffe!" one New Democrat said when he saw me at a friend's house in the mid-1970's. "Just help me." Like my father I argued with many people. After taking therapy I quieted down. Yet I caused many problems in many organizations I was part of.. My father did the same.
    Once my father crashed a meeting on issues of ageing. "Seniors don't do anything progressive," he told the gerontologist who'd given a good speech on how seniors could be organized into a progressive force. "They're just hopeless." The woman gerontologist never forgave him for this unasked for intrusion..
     My dada and I were simply father and son. "They're both peas from the same pod," some would have said of us both. And they'd be right.