Elvis the Pelvis. Part Three.
In 1958 Elvis Presley joined the U.S. Army. In those days of the Cold War the U.S. draft was in full swing. Millions of young American males joined the armed forces without a protest. Only some male members of a few religious groups were exempt from the draft. All others had to go.
Presley willingly joined the army. He served two years mostly in West Germany where he was promoted to sergeant. He came home in 1960 and a huge t.v. pageant was put on to welcome him back. Yet the decade of the 1960's proved to be very different from that of the previous decade. Soon the U.S. was embroiled in an unwinnable war in Indochina. African Americans took to the streets to win equal rights. New groups from Great Britain like the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones poured out new music. Then Bob Dylan sang songs that were very challenging to conventional tastes. The new music was way different than Elvis's.
As musical tastes changed, so did Elvis. His mother died and that hurt him. He appeared in very forgettable films like 'Blue Hawaii' and sang songs that were saccharine sweet. Presley now lived in a huge home in Memphis called Graceland. Here, Presley partied, did legal and maybe illegal drugs and probably had many women. His fame was still legendary yet he had changed. The Beatles found him somewhat strange when they visited him in the mid-1960's.
In May 1967 he married Priscilla Ann Wagner whom he'd met in Germany. Yet Presley married or single wasn't well. The couple were divorced in 1973. They had a daughter named Lisa Marie who later married another famous and disturbed rock star namely Michael Jackson. In the late 1960's, a cultural revolution was in full swing across the western world. Presley loathed the cultural revolutionaries and the Black Power advocates who praised armed struggle. "Kill your parents," Yippie leader Jerry Rubin told the young people of America. Nor did Elvis have any time for those who burned their draft cards.
"Hell no" young people chanted outside draft office and while taking part in anti-Vietnam war marches. "We won't go (to Vietnam)." Tens of thousands of young men fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Others went to prison. All of this appalled Elvis. "Elvis Presley gave money to George Wallace," yippie journalist Paul Krasner said in effect in 1968. Still, Krasner couldn't prove this. Wallace was a pro-segregationist anti-protestor governor of Alabama. He ran third in the 1968 U.S. presidential election with 16 per cent of the vote.
Republican candidate Richard Nixon won the election just squeaking past Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Presley may not only have supported George Wallace. In the early 1970's he visited president Nixon in the White House carrying to Nixon an anti-drug message. Nixon welcomed the king of rock'n roll for he was under attack from the left. Nixon praised Presley who by this time may have been addicted to a number of drugs. In any case, the support of Presley didn't hurt Nixon's political fortunes.
Saturday, 20 January 2018
Friday, 19 January 2018
Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man By Dave Jaffe Elvis the Pelvis; Chapter Five. Part Two
Elvis the Pelvis. Part Two.
No one in the U.S. of A. needed to worry about Elvis Presley's politics. He was as clean as they come. he loved America, didn't do drugs, at first anyway, was polite to nearly everybody and posed no danger at all. He even paved the way for African American singers to appear. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino started to make real money after Elvis became famous. They were just as wild on stage as Elvis was.
White imitators soon popped up in England like Cliff Richards and Johnny Halliday became a famous French rock'n roller. Yet neither of these two or more watered down American imitators like Fabian or Ricky Nelson could match Elvis's raw sex appeal. The British group of Bill Hailey and his Comets made an impact but still weren't in Presley's league.
Millions of young men now grew their hair long, just like Elvis and combed it backwards into what was called 'a duck's tail', exactly like Elvis did. Others set up quartets to copy or sing Presley type songs. Rock and roll now started to sweep the world, outside that is of communist countries where the youth longed to hear it but couldn't.
What Elvis Aaron Presley did was in some ways incredible.He had helped create a new music and a new industry based on rock music. Neither he nor his very clever manager had asked for government subsidies like the energy industry or some NGO's do to-day. Presley just sang music, like rock'n roll but also gospel music, Christian hymns, country music and even operatic arias. His music helped push the recording industry to new heights.
Of course Presley couldn't have done this alone. The aforementioned record industry was part of the 1950's infrastructure that helped him. Also out there in 1950's America was radio, television. the phonograph, newspapers and magazines. Nearly all these parts of the mass media were thriving. Without these building blocks, Presley's career would never have taken off as it did. With their help, Presley became a super star who sent rock'n roll all over the non-communist world.
"He was a genius," one Vancouver musician said about Presley many years later. "He was 'The King' who sold over 20 million records." In fact Presley may have sold over a billion records. Even to-day fifty years after his death, Presley remains an American icon and deservedly so.
No one in the U.S. of A. needed to worry about Elvis Presley's politics. He was as clean as they come. he loved America, didn't do drugs, at first anyway, was polite to nearly everybody and posed no danger at all. He even paved the way for African American singers to appear. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino started to make real money after Elvis became famous. They were just as wild on stage as Elvis was.
White imitators soon popped up in England like Cliff Richards and Johnny Halliday became a famous French rock'n roller. Yet neither of these two or more watered down American imitators like Fabian or Ricky Nelson could match Elvis's raw sex appeal. The British group of Bill Hailey and his Comets made an impact but still weren't in Presley's league.
Millions of young men now grew their hair long, just like Elvis and combed it backwards into what was called 'a duck's tail', exactly like Elvis did. Others set up quartets to copy or sing Presley type songs. Rock and roll now started to sweep the world, outside that is of communist countries where the youth longed to hear it but couldn't.
What Elvis Aaron Presley did was in some ways incredible.He had helped create a new music and a new industry based on rock music. Neither he nor his very clever manager had asked for government subsidies like the energy industry or some NGO's do to-day. Presley just sang music, like rock'n roll but also gospel music, Christian hymns, country music and even operatic arias. His music helped push the recording industry to new heights.
Of course Presley couldn't have done this alone. The aforementioned record industry was part of the 1950's infrastructure that helped him. Also out there in 1950's America was radio, television. the phonograph, newspapers and magazines. Nearly all these parts of the mass media were thriving. Without these building blocks, Presley's career would never have taken off as it did. With their help, Presley became a super star who sent rock'n roll all over the non-communist world.
"He was a genius," one Vancouver musician said about Presley many years later. "He was 'The King' who sold over 20 million records." In fact Presley may have sold over a billion records. Even to-day fifty years after his death, Presley remains an American icon and deservedly so.
Wednesday, 20 December 2017
Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man. Chapter Five Part One.. Elvis the Pelvis.
Elvis the Pelvis - Part One.
Before the Beatles, before Dylan, before the Boss, namely Bruce Springsteen, before the Clash, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Smoky Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé or Adele, there was Elvis Aaron Presley. He created rock music, or rock'n roll, as it was first called. "If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound," said the Memphis-based record producer Sam Phillips in the early 1950"s, "and this man had a Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."
Lo and behold in August 1953 a tall 19 year old man showed up in Phillips's small recording studio in Memphis. His name was Elvis Aaron Presley and he revolutionized popular music. First off, he recorded a song in the studio and it went nowhere. Then in January 1954 he cut another record in Phillips's studio and it too turned nobody on. Yet then times changed. Presley came back in July 1954. He sang a few nondescript songs. Yet then near night time he sang a song first recorded by a black or African American singer called Arthur Crudup. It was called 'That's All Right'.
Phillips suddenly realized that this young man was the person he'd been looking for. He recorded Elvis singing Crudup's song. On the record's other side - the 'B' side as it was then called- he put Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'. In both of these songs Elvis Presley fused together rhythm and blues which was an African American music with country and western music, which was a white person's music. Presley had invented a new music. At first it was called rock'n roll. He was only 19 years old.
Phillips soon sold his right to Presley's music to a slick agent called Tom Parker for $35,000. Parker also became Elvis's manager. Parker turned Presley into a super star. In 1956 Presley appeared on three top t.v..shows, including the Ed Sullivan show. Presley's songs now soared to the top of the music charts. 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Don't Be Cruel', 'Hound Dog' and other of his songs added up to one half of all the records that the giant record company RCA sold in 1956.
Yet Presley wasn't only selling music. He was also selling sexual excitement. His gyrations and twists onstage, threw young girls into ecstasy and heart throbs. They screamed, cried and yelled as Presley performed. "I think they were having orgasms," one 20's something male said about Elvis's female fans years later. Ed Sullivan, or some other t.v. emcee stopped t.v. cameras from showing
Elvis below the waist. Soon Elvis was called 'Elvis the Pelvis'.
The authorities were alarmed. In the mid-1950's, the United States was a totally segregated society. yet here was a white man, barely out of his teens who sang like a black man and could literally move millions of young people especially young girls. J. Edgar Hoover, the then head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sounded off about the Elvis phenomenon. "Presley," he said, " is a definite danger to the security of the United States." In the mid-1950's, the U.S. and the communist-ruled Soviet Union were locked in a titanic struggle for control of the world. Hoover and many other figures of the establishment were terrified of communism. Suppose Presley was a communist primed to subvert the U.S. What would happen then?
Before the Beatles, before Dylan, before the Boss, namely Bruce Springsteen, before the Clash, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Smoky Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé or Adele, there was Elvis Aaron Presley. He created rock music, or rock'n roll, as it was first called. "If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound," said the Memphis-based record producer Sam Phillips in the early 1950"s, "and this man had a Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."
Lo and behold in August 1953 a tall 19 year old man showed up in Phillips's small recording studio in Memphis. His name was Elvis Aaron Presley and he revolutionized popular music. First off, he recorded a song in the studio and it went nowhere. Then in January 1954 he cut another record in Phillips's studio and it too turned nobody on. Yet then times changed. Presley came back in July 1954. He sang a few nondescript songs. Yet then near night time he sang a song first recorded by a black or African American singer called Arthur Crudup. It was called 'That's All Right'.
Phillips suddenly realized that this young man was the person he'd been looking for. He recorded Elvis singing Crudup's song. On the record's other side - the 'B' side as it was then called- he put Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'. In both of these songs Elvis Presley fused together rhythm and blues which was an African American music with country and western music, which was a white person's music. Presley had invented a new music. At first it was called rock'n roll. He was only 19 years old.
Phillips soon sold his right to Presley's music to a slick agent called Tom Parker for $35,000. Parker also became Elvis's manager. Parker turned Presley into a super star. In 1956 Presley appeared on three top t.v..shows, including the Ed Sullivan show. Presley's songs now soared to the top of the music charts. 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Don't Be Cruel', 'Hound Dog' and other of his songs added up to one half of all the records that the giant record company RCA sold in 1956.
Yet Presley wasn't only selling music. He was also selling sexual excitement. His gyrations and twists onstage, threw young girls into ecstasy and heart throbs. They screamed, cried and yelled as Presley performed. "I think they were having orgasms," one 20's something male said about Elvis's female fans years later. Ed Sullivan, or some other t.v. emcee stopped t.v. cameras from showing
Elvis below the waist. Soon Elvis was called 'Elvis the Pelvis'.
The authorities were alarmed. In the mid-1950's, the United States was a totally segregated society. yet here was a white man, barely out of his teens who sang like a black man and could literally move millions of young people especially young girls. J. Edgar Hoover, the then head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sounded off about the Elvis phenomenon. "Presley," he said, " is a definite danger to the security of the United States." In the mid-1950's, the U.S. and the communist-ruled Soviet Union were locked in a titanic struggle for control of the world. Hoover and many other figures of the establishment were terrified of communism. Suppose Presley was a communist primed to subvert the U.S. What would happen then?
Saturday, 9 December 2017
Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe: The Rise and Fall of Freudianism - Part Two
Chapter Four. Part Two of The Rise and Fall of Freudianism..
Many of Freud's ideas don't sound too good to-day For instance he believed that women suffered from what he called "penis envy". All young men he said had what he called "An Oedipus Complex.". In other words subconsciously they wanted to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Freud's claims for these complexes don't stand up to examination.
In his lifetime Freud had his critics. In the city of Vienna, Freud who was a Jew, faced virulent anti-Semitism. And Freud spent most of his life in this city. Also other psychologists like the behaviourist B.F. Skinner had no time for Freud's theories. Some Anglo-American philosophers doubted Freud's system from the very start.
Still, by about the late 1950's Freud was seen as the greatest scientists of all time. Yet then came his downfall. Already in her massive 1949 book 'The Second Sex', the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir had criticized Freud's psychology. In 1963, the American feminist Betty Friedan went after Freudian psychology in 'The Feminine Mystique'. Years later Gloria Steinem a very prominent feminist ridiculed Freud and Freudianism. "Freud was just a straight male chauvinist," a feminists told this author in the late 1970's. "His theories are just being used to oppress us women and keep us down."
This was how many feminists were now seeing Freud. Freud's theories they asserted were just totally false ands oppressed women.
Soon male critics appeared and started to trash Freud. Neuroscientists didn't believe Freud's view of the mind. Peter Swales, who at one time had worked for the Rolling Stones band, condemned Freud for his use of cocaine and his love affair with his sister-in-law. Frederick Crews an English professor at Berkeley University, first praised Freud but then turned on him. Crews's latest book called 'Freud: The Making of An Illusion' spends 746 pages charging Freud with one sin after another. Crews's book title echoes Freud's famous book on religion called 'The Future of An Illusion'.
Freud's reputation now is blurred. He died in England in exile in 1939, having fled Vienna to escape Hitler's troops who annexed Austria. So he's not here to defend himself. Yet others have. They point out that Freud's methods of healing patients was for the time relatively humane. He didn't use drugs on patients, carry out lobotomies or practice electric shock therapy treatments. Many others did when Freud started his practice. Others continued to do these sorts of treatments long after Freud had died.
Then, too Freud did not molest, abuse, rape or stalk his patients. He just sat down and listened to them talk. Nor did he put his patients in hospitals where many patients just wasted away. Many women back then suffered from hysteria. This is a very rare disease today. Yet Freud did cure many of his patients. Of course Freud's claim to be practicing a science doesn't stand up to examination to-day. It also seems that he lied about his patients and his cures.
Also some modern drugs do seem to work faster on mental problems than talking to a psychiatrist. A man who passed away a few years ago was an epileptic. "I had terrible explosions of anger," he once confessed. "But the drug Dilantin calmed me down." Modern pharmacology has helped soften but not cure not only epilepsy but also bi-polar syndrome and schizophrenia. Drugs work much faster than Freudian talk fests.
Stanley Cavett is a philosopher who admires Freud. "Most philosophers in my tradition," he says, "relate to psychoanalysis with suspicion, habitually asking whether psychoanalysis deserves the title of a science. Still, says Cavett, "Freud achieved an unsurpassed horizon of knowledge about the human mind." Freudianism today is just one of 60 branches of psychology and Sigmund Freud no longer is praised by too many people as a paragon of intellect and a genius.
Like many past visionaries his flame of inspiration has now burnt out. Or as post modernists might say, "This is just another Grand Narrative that no longer makes sense."
Many of Freud's ideas don't sound too good to-day For instance he believed that women suffered from what he called "penis envy". All young men he said had what he called "An Oedipus Complex.". In other words subconsciously they wanted to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Freud's claims for these complexes don't stand up to examination.
In his lifetime Freud had his critics. In the city of Vienna, Freud who was a Jew, faced virulent anti-Semitism. And Freud spent most of his life in this city. Also other psychologists like the behaviourist B.F. Skinner had no time for Freud's theories. Some Anglo-American philosophers doubted Freud's system from the very start.
Still, by about the late 1950's Freud was seen as the greatest scientists of all time. Yet then came his downfall. Already in her massive 1949 book 'The Second Sex', the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir had criticized Freud's psychology. In 1963, the American feminist Betty Friedan went after Freudian psychology in 'The Feminine Mystique'. Years later Gloria Steinem a very prominent feminist ridiculed Freud and Freudianism. "Freud was just a straight male chauvinist," a feminists told this author in the late 1970's. "His theories are just being used to oppress us women and keep us down."
This was how many feminists were now seeing Freud. Freud's theories they asserted were just totally false ands oppressed women.
Soon male critics appeared and started to trash Freud. Neuroscientists didn't believe Freud's view of the mind. Peter Swales, who at one time had worked for the Rolling Stones band, condemned Freud for his use of cocaine and his love affair with his sister-in-law. Frederick Crews an English professor at Berkeley University, first praised Freud but then turned on him. Crews's latest book called 'Freud: The Making of An Illusion' spends 746 pages charging Freud with one sin after another. Crews's book title echoes Freud's famous book on religion called 'The Future of An Illusion'.
Freud's reputation now is blurred. He died in England in exile in 1939, having fled Vienna to escape Hitler's troops who annexed Austria. So he's not here to defend himself. Yet others have. They point out that Freud's methods of healing patients was for the time relatively humane. He didn't use drugs on patients, carry out lobotomies or practice electric shock therapy treatments. Many others did when Freud started his practice. Others continued to do these sorts of treatments long after Freud had died.
Then, too Freud did not molest, abuse, rape or stalk his patients. He just sat down and listened to them talk. Nor did he put his patients in hospitals where many patients just wasted away. Many women back then suffered from hysteria. This is a very rare disease today. Yet Freud did cure many of his patients. Of course Freud's claim to be practicing a science doesn't stand up to examination to-day. It also seems that he lied about his patients and his cures.
Also some modern drugs do seem to work faster on mental problems than talking to a psychiatrist. A man who passed away a few years ago was an epileptic. "I had terrible explosions of anger," he once confessed. "But the drug Dilantin calmed me down." Modern pharmacology has helped soften but not cure not only epilepsy but also bi-polar syndrome and schizophrenia. Drugs work much faster than Freudian talk fests.
Stanley Cavett is a philosopher who admires Freud. "Most philosophers in my tradition," he says, "relate to psychoanalysis with suspicion, habitually asking whether psychoanalysis deserves the title of a science. Still, says Cavett, "Freud achieved an unsurpassed horizon of knowledge about the human mind." Freudianism today is just one of 60 branches of psychology and Sigmund Freud no longer is praised by too many people as a paragon of intellect and a genius.
Like many past visionaries his flame of inspiration has now burnt out. Or as post modernists might say, "This is just another Grand Narrative that no longer makes sense."
Tuesday, 5 December 2017
Enda and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Four, Part One.
The Rise and Fall of Sigmund Freud. Part One
Whatever happened to Sigmund Freud? In 1954, the well known American psychologist Calvin S. Hall published a book called ' A Primer of Freudian Psychology'. Freud, Hall claimed created what he called "a dynamic human psychology.". This psychology, Hall said, studied the changes and transformations of energy within the human personality...
"This was Freud's greatest achievement," Hall wrote, "and is one of the greatest achievements in modern history. It is certainly the crucial event in the history of psychology." Yet what was supposed to be true in mid-1950's America seems to be no longer believed in 2017. To-day Freud is rarely mentioned and his theories are mostly ignored.
Hall didn't stand alone in his enthusiasm for Freud. Writers like the U.S. sociologist Philip Rieff. Marthe Robert in France and the famous literary scholar and novelist Lionel Trilling praised Freud as a great truth seeker. Few people do this today. So what happened? Well, times change and people change with it.
Born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1856 and back then what was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud became a medical student and then a doctor of medicine. He visited France and Germany and studied psychology in France. Soon he developed his theories of psychology using what was called "the talking cure".
Upper middle class men and many women with mental problems came to Freud's office in Vienna to talk to him and pour out their inner struggles. They sat on a famous couch in his study. Freud listened to them and then suggested ways to cure their neuroses. Freud didn't just propose cures. He also expounded theories about why men and women had mental problems. The human mind, he claimed had three main systems.
First off, there was the id, which should rid the mind of tension. The id was the home of dreams, desires and mental illnesses. Then comes the ego, which should control the id. The ego if healthy, keeps everything going normally in the mental arena. Third, comes the super ego, which has the power to punish the person or approve of a person's actions. Along with these three components, Freud claimed to have discovered other parts of the mind. There was the pleasure principle, instincts and many other driving forces. For Freud, the id must be reined in, and the ego should take control.
"Where id was," went one of the Freudians's most famous slogans, "let ego be." This was how a person became mentally healthy. Yet Freud was not just a doctor and a theorist of the mind. He was also an author who poured out his ideas in many books. Works of his like "The Future of An Illusion'., "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life', and 'Three Essays on Sexuality' became well-known. A gifted stylist, Freud wrote in an attractive style. These books and a growing circle of devotees made Freud famous - at least with some people.
Whatever happened to Sigmund Freud? In 1954, the well known American psychologist Calvin S. Hall published a book called ' A Primer of Freudian Psychology'. Freud, Hall claimed created what he called "a dynamic human psychology.". This psychology, Hall said, studied the changes and transformations of energy within the human personality...
"This was Freud's greatest achievement," Hall wrote, "and is one of the greatest achievements in modern history. It is certainly the crucial event in the history of psychology." Yet what was supposed to be true in mid-1950's America seems to be no longer believed in 2017. To-day Freud is rarely mentioned and his theories are mostly ignored.
Hall didn't stand alone in his enthusiasm for Freud. Writers like the U.S. sociologist Philip Rieff. Marthe Robert in France and the famous literary scholar and novelist Lionel Trilling praised Freud as a great truth seeker. Few people do this today. So what happened? Well, times change and people change with it.
Born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1856 and back then what was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud became a medical student and then a doctor of medicine. He visited France and Germany and studied psychology in France. Soon he developed his theories of psychology using what was called "the talking cure".
Upper middle class men and many women with mental problems came to Freud's office in Vienna to talk to him and pour out their inner struggles. They sat on a famous couch in his study. Freud listened to them and then suggested ways to cure their neuroses. Freud didn't just propose cures. He also expounded theories about why men and women had mental problems. The human mind, he claimed had three main systems.
First off, there was the id, which should rid the mind of tension. The id was the home of dreams, desires and mental illnesses. Then comes the ego, which should control the id. The ego if healthy, keeps everything going normally in the mental arena. Third, comes the super ego, which has the power to punish the person or approve of a person's actions. Along with these three components, Freud claimed to have discovered other parts of the mind. There was the pleasure principle, instincts and many other driving forces. For Freud, the id must be reined in, and the ego should take control.
"Where id was," went one of the Freudians's most famous slogans, "let ego be." This was how a person became mentally healthy. Yet Freud was not just a doctor and a theorist of the mind. He was also an author who poured out his ideas in many books. Works of his like "The Future of An Illusion'., "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life', and 'Three Essays on Sexuality' became well-known. A gifted stylist, Freud wrote in an attractive style. These books and a growing circle of devotees made Freud famous - at least with some people.
Thursday, 23 November 2017
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.
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.
Wednesday, 15 November 2017
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.
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.
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