Must aquacise music be booming, thumping, electronic dreck?
Why not Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf?" Why not Handel's "Water Music?"
I thought of this the other afternoon in the local public swimming pool complex's hot tub.
My water was steamy wonderful, but the aquacise class in the nearby pool was splashing to
"music to weld by," "fascist disco music," as I have called such ear abuse before.
Even Australian Mrs. Thompson in her tight red track suit wouldn't bop to that beat. My Grade 3 teacher played for us Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," the version in which the conductor explains various instruments standing for various characters. The oboe stood for the duck, I recall.
Aquacisers could listen to that, splash their way to fitness, and go home humming a great tune. Instead, a 20-something scrawn commands over the loudspeaker, which sadly has enough room for dance music from hell, too. I'm not surprised that the ranted at, musically-mugged women left the pool with a shuffle, not a lilt, in their steps. You can't lilt to that music, in water or on land.
By contrast, Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" or Handel's "Water Music" might make people enjoy aquacises. They might skip home, and hop eagerly to the next aquacise class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuw8YjSbKd4
That's Handel above. Makes you wanna twinkle your toes, eh?
While I'm on about music, Frederich Nietzsche's art form best able to narrate the human spirit, I'll mention Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson on the recycling dumpster behind the public library. "How did I get here?" they might ask, as the Talkings Heads did in a song, a song better for aquacises than what I heard this week. The duo are safe, even if Nelson is dead; but their compact disk was atop the recycle dumpster, I noticed when I dropped in my own recycling.
I borrowed and returned this disk months ago: "Two Men with the Blues." The library people said it did not rejoin the collection, but I convinced them that I returned it. They never found it, but they believed me and did not make me pay for it.
Imagine my surprise when I found this disk on the recycle dumpster. The library shares a building with the regional district government offices. Someone threw out this disk. It seems I did get the disk back into the building, whose tenants later discarded it.
The library clerk was happy to have it back. "Did you find the case, too? Now we can re-order."
It was miracle enough to find the disk, albeit too scratched to play again. Perhaps she was trying to be funny. Perhaps she just came from aquacises, and was therefore unable to be funny, let alone musical.
Handel's link is above. Have Prokofiev and the Talking Heads below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydOO91xQBH4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7pVjl4Rrtc
When next you swim, think of oboes, ducks, Prokofiev, Handel, and anything but typical, terrible aquacise music. Booma booma in a pig's eye.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
Would You, Could You, In the Dark?
Would you walk 500 metres down a slippery, 45-degree slope in the dark?
I wouldn't. I didn't, although I walked up the slope before sundown.
Curiosity didn't kill this cat, but it put him in danger twice; but the risks
were instructive, as the Ancient Mariner might tell the Wedding Guest.
Only climb what's climbable in runners, I have long thought. I don't fear heights. I
only fear falling from them. Actually, I only fear hitting the bottom:
A week later, wearing the grippier shoes, I biked down the trail to below the cement wall.
Various interruptions that day delayed my start until after 1600h, but there were still
three hours of daylight.
Various interruptions arose while I composed this tale. Perhaps an uninterrupted life,
like an unexamined life, is not worth living. An unexamined, steep, rocky, ravine-slivered
slope is certainly worth examining, if one wants to climb it and live.
Bicycle stashed behind the shrubbery partway up the hill, I began to climb.
Work gloves helped my grip when on all fours, but prickles pierced the gloves, and
a couple remain under my skin two days later. Rocks tumbled now and then, as I
slipped downward, but a couple sticks I found en route helped me stick to the slope.
They also eased my prickled hands. I missed climbing hills and mountains in Alberta,
prickle-free.
Dirt cascaded down my shoes sought traction. There were few trees to hold.
The sun sank in the sky over the nearby Fraser River.
Near the top, I met a steeper place, detoured around it, and reached the level of
the mysterious cement wall. It was about 50 metres south of where I rose. I
suspected the wall was for the railway track. It was, for there was the track.
It wound northward around a bend behind me, a few metres below the top of the
valley. Ahead of me, Williams Lake lights twinkled about five kilometres to the south.
I looked down the hill, noticed the sun lower in the sky, and began to descend.
I followed a rock-strewn spillway below a culvert, below the train track. About
halfway down, the rocks met a drop too steep for me. I went town-ward, along the
slope, but that way looked too steep, too, especially as the sun skimmed the horizon.
Well, thought I, it took an hour to ascend, a half-hour to descend to this precipice,
and it would be dark within an hour. A slip in the dark, a fall of even a couple
metres, could hurt me too much keep going. Don't die here, I thought.
Wanting neither to die nor to climb back up to the tracks and walk out that long
way, I was in a hillside dilemma. My bike was below. Walking out
on the train tracks, back to the start of the trail along the river, and back to my
bike, would be more than 10 kilometres, in the dark.
I chose to incur less risk, walk up, out along the tracks, back to the start of the
trail, then back to my bike.
This first danger I had gotten into was over, now that I trod level ground; but
another danger was coming.
I walked a few kilometres along the tracks. As I walked into the city's north
end, past two sawmills, I thought I might be wise merely to walk home, and return
the next day for my bike. A deer crossed the tracks a few feet in front of me.
Then the Moon came out. I recalled skiing in the moonlight near Chetwynd
in 1998. I figured a moonlight walk along the trail in 2014 would be another
glowing memory. I therefore went to the trail and started walking the three
downhill and three flat kilometres to my cached bike.
Then the moon went behind growing clouds. It got mighty dark along that trail.
Here came my second danger: bears. In the past month, four bears have prowled
in the city. Conservation officers, inaptly named, shot them, rather than tranquilizing
and relocating them. Location is everything, realtors say. Bears might agree. My
outrage over shot bears diminished as I walked the trail, expecting fewer bears;
but one bear would be too many for me.
Bears around here are not afraid of people, unlike bears where I grew up, in
west-central Alberta. There, I would bicycle to the dump, watch bears eat the
garbage, clap my hands, and the bears would run away. Clapping my hands here
might invite a bear to dinner, which might be me.
I had kept one of the two sticks I had found while I climbed the hill to the tracks.
The dark woods crackled with noises, not heavy enough to be a bear, I hoped.
The Williams River burbled beside the trail. A couple times I raised my stick in
both hands, ninja-style, planning to whack or stab any attacking bear. I hoped the
bear wouldn't notice that I was a mere fake ninja. A whack or a poke might
make a bear mad enough to claw and chew me more. Bears have pride.
Ten or so years ago, a woman in the Kootenays survived a grizzly bear attack.
She lay on her stomach, as still as she could. The bear sniffed and left. She later
said that she noticed what bad breath the bear had. She smelled grizzly breath and
lived to tell about it.
Eight years ago, I was untangling a boat from shore shrubs near Kluskus, about
200 kilometres northwest of Williams Lake. A grizzly had been keeping children from
the school I then ran there. I heard crunching ten metres away, and saw a grizzly,
downwind of me, foraging. Not wanting to be foraged, I got that boat out
on the water pretty quick. The bear could have swum to the boat, I suppose; but I felt
safer on the water than on the shore.
School children could have given unique excuses for not doing their homework:
"A bear ate it." "A bear ate my little brother." "The bear didn't know this math."
That was my second grizzly. My first had been safely on the ground, no blasting
conservation officers prowling. I was in a helicopter flying over Virginia Falls,
twice the height of Niagara Falls. The falls are on the Nahanni River, west of
Yellowknife. Six of us working at the Fort Simpson Hudson's Bay Northern Store
had chartered the helicopter, for $100 each, in July, 1986, for a day trip. We landed
near the falls, with no bear in sight.
We also landed by Little Doctor Lake. There, their food cached in a wooden box
up a tree, lived a man and his daughter, about 11. She was preparing to go to school
for the first time in her life. We visitors wrote our names in their autograph book.
An older book boasted the autograph of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
His 1970 travels in the area would convince him to declare the area a national park.
Back in the spooky woods, less than a kilometre from my bicycle, I heard a loud
splash in the river. It sounded like a big rock thrown in. I hoped it was a deer, not a bear.
When I got to where I thought my bike was, I picked my way through the dark and
shrubbery. I found nothing. Then I walked back along the trail, through more shrubbery,
and found my bike. Mary Shelley's The Last Man, from the Kamloops library, was still in
the saddlebag. I was glad not to be the last man, as I rode out, slowly, on the trail in
the dark.
An hour later, I was home, a bit scratched, my socks heavy with prickles. As I soaked
in the tub, teapot nearby, I cleaned my socks and listened to the podcast of "Union Made,"
the weekly labor news show on Vancouver Co-Op Radio: http://www.coopradio.org/
I was glad for the adventure; testing myself, reasonably, was satisfying. It increased my
respect for nature, for its superiority over us, and it made me want to reduce the tragic distance
between us and nature, of which we are a part.
The Dr. Seuss-style "Would You, Could You, in the Dark" title for this little tale
comes from the same book that someone working at the local, publicly-owned liquor
store knows. There, by the bottle return, is a handwritten couplet to beer. It asks,
"Would you, could you, with a goat? Would you, could you, in a boat" drink beer?
I was in the liquor store yesterday to buy a wee box of four 250-ml beers for $4.60.
They were brewed in Prince George, about 240 km north of where I type. I am sure
there are many cliffs and bears between here and there.
We share Earth. In vain we try to dominate it, ultimately impossible, luckily.
Would you fall off here or there, would you fall of anywhere?
Would you, could you, way out there, be eaten, eaten by a bear?
( I don't know why some paragraphs are screwy. I don't blame bears, or beers.)
I wouldn't. I didn't, although I walked up the slope before sundown.
Curiosity didn't kill this cat, but it put him in danger twice; but the risks
were instructive, as the Ancient Mariner might tell the Wedding Guest.
Riding my bicycle down the Williams River Valley trail ten kilometres to the Fraser
River last week, I noticed a cement retaining wall. It was about 10 metres long and a metre
high. It was about 200 metres above the trail, about two kilometres from the Fraser. I wondered
why the wall was there, and planned to find out next trip, with new, grippier shoes.
Only climb what's climbable in runners, I have long thought. I don't fear heights. I
only fear falling from them. Actually, I only fear hitting the bottom:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=williams+lake+river+valley+trail&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Faw4VPOcOobfoAS4pIKoDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg&biw=1280&bih=565
A week later, wearing the grippier shoes, I biked down the trail to below the cement wall.
Various interruptions that day delayed my start until after 1600h, but there were still
three hours of daylight.
Various interruptions arose while I composed this tale. Perhaps an uninterrupted life,
like an unexamined life, is not worth living. An unexamined, steep, rocky, ravine-slivered
slope is certainly worth examining, if one wants to climb it and live.
Bicycle stashed behind the shrubbery partway up the hill, I began to climb.
Work gloves helped my grip when on all fours, but prickles pierced the gloves, and
a couple remain under my skin two days later. Rocks tumbled now and then, as I
slipped downward, but a couple sticks I found en route helped me stick to the slope.
They also eased my prickled hands. I missed climbing hills and mountains in Alberta,
prickle-free.
Dirt cascaded down my shoes sought traction. There were few trees to hold.
The sun sank in the sky over the nearby Fraser River.
Near the top, I met a steeper place, detoured around it, and reached the level of
the mysterious cement wall. It was about 50 metres south of where I rose. I
suspected the wall was for the railway track. It was, for there was the track.
It wound northward around a bend behind me, a few metres below the top of the
valley. Ahead of me, Williams Lake lights twinkled about five kilometres to the south.
I looked down the hill, noticed the sun lower in the sky, and began to descend.
I followed a rock-strewn spillway below a culvert, below the train track. About
halfway down, the rocks met a drop too steep for me. I went town-ward, along the
slope, but that way looked too steep, too, especially as the sun skimmed the horizon.
Well, thought I, it took an hour to ascend, a half-hour to descend to this precipice,
and it would be dark within an hour. A slip in the dark, a fall of even a couple
metres, could hurt me too much keep going. Don't die here, I thought.
Wanting neither to die nor to climb back up to the tracks and walk out that long
way, I was in a hillside dilemma. My bike was below. Walking out
on the train tracks, back to the start of the trail along the river, and back to my
bike, would be more than 10 kilometres, in the dark.
I chose to incur less risk, walk up, out along the tracks, back to the start of the
trail, then back to my bike.
This first danger I had gotten into was over, now that I trod level ground; but
another danger was coming.
I walked a few kilometres along the tracks. As I walked into the city's north
end, past two sawmills, I thought I might be wise merely to walk home, and return
the next day for my bike. A deer crossed the tracks a few feet in front of me.
Then the Moon came out. I recalled skiing in the moonlight near Chetwynd
in 1998. I figured a moonlight walk along the trail in 2014 would be another
glowing memory. I therefore went to the trail and started walking the three
downhill and three flat kilometres to my cached bike.
Then the moon went behind growing clouds. It got mighty dark along that trail.
Here came my second danger: bears. In the past month, four bears have prowled
in the city. Conservation officers, inaptly named, shot them, rather than tranquilizing
and relocating them. Location is everything, realtors say. Bears might agree. My
outrage over shot bears diminished as I walked the trail, expecting fewer bears;
but one bear would be too many for me.
Bears around here are not afraid of people, unlike bears where I grew up, in
west-central Alberta. There, I would bicycle to the dump, watch bears eat the
garbage, clap my hands, and the bears would run away. Clapping my hands here
might invite a bear to dinner, which might be me.
I had kept one of the two sticks I had found while I climbed the hill to the tracks.
The dark woods crackled with noises, not heavy enough to be a bear, I hoped.
The Williams River burbled beside the trail. A couple times I raised my stick in
both hands, ninja-style, planning to whack or stab any attacking bear. I hoped the
bear wouldn't notice that I was a mere fake ninja. A whack or a poke might
make a bear mad enough to claw and chew me more. Bears have pride.
Ten or so years ago, a woman in the Kootenays survived a grizzly bear attack.
She lay on her stomach, as still as she could. The bear sniffed and left. She later
said that she noticed what bad breath the bear had. She smelled grizzly breath and
lived to tell about it.
Eight years ago, I was untangling a boat from shore shrubs near Kluskus, about
200 kilometres northwest of Williams Lake. A grizzly had been keeping children from
the school I then ran there. I heard crunching ten metres away, and saw a grizzly,
downwind of me, foraging. Not wanting to be foraged, I got that boat out
on the water pretty quick. The bear could have swum to the boat, I suppose; but I felt
safer on the water than on the shore.
School children could have given unique excuses for not doing their homework:
"A bear ate it." "A bear ate my little brother." "The bear didn't know this math."
That was my second grizzly. My first had been safely on the ground, no blasting
conservation officers prowling. I was in a helicopter flying over Virginia Falls,
twice the height of Niagara Falls. The falls are on the Nahanni River, west of
Yellowknife. Six of us working at the Fort Simpson Hudson's Bay Northern Store
had chartered the helicopter, for $100 each, in July, 1986, for a day trip. We landed
near the falls, with no bear in sight.
We also landed by Little Doctor Lake. There, their food cached in a wooden box
up a tree, lived a man and his daughter, about 11. She was preparing to go to school
for the first time in her life. We visitors wrote our names in their autograph book.
An older book boasted the autograph of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
His 1970 travels in the area would convince him to declare the area a national park.
Back in the spooky woods, less than a kilometre from my bicycle, I heard a loud
splash in the river. It sounded like a big rock thrown in. I hoped it was a deer, not a bear.
When I got to where I thought my bike was, I picked my way through the dark and
shrubbery. I found nothing. Then I walked back along the trail, through more shrubbery,
and found my bike. Mary Shelley's The Last Man, from the Kamloops library, was still in
the saddlebag. I was glad not to be the last man, as I rode out, slowly, on the trail in
the dark.
An hour later, I was home, a bit scratched, my socks heavy with prickles. As I soaked
in the tub, teapot nearby, I cleaned my socks and listened to the podcast of "Union Made,"
the weekly labor news show on Vancouver Co-Op Radio: http://www.coopradio.org/
I was glad for the adventure; testing myself, reasonably, was satisfying. It increased my
respect for nature, for its superiority over us, and it made me want to reduce the tragic distance
between us and nature, of which we are a part.
The Dr. Seuss-style "Would You, Could You, in the Dark" title for this little tale
comes from the same book that someone working at the local, publicly-owned liquor
store knows. There, by the bottle return, is a handwritten couplet to beer. It asks,
"Would you, could you, with a goat? Would you, could you, in a boat" drink beer?
I was in the liquor store yesterday to buy a wee box of four 250-ml beers for $4.60.
They were brewed in Prince George, about 240 km north of where I type. I am sure
there are many cliffs and bears between here and there.
We share Earth. In vain we try to dominate it, ultimately impossible, luckily.
Would you fall off here or there, would you fall of anywhere?
Would you, could you, way out there, be eaten, eaten by a bear?
( I don't know why some paragraphs are screwy. I don't blame bears, or beers.)
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
I Happen to Have Professor Eagleton Right Behind Pip
In his 1975 film Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character overhears, in a movie lineup, an academic misconstruing Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan's theories. His partner Annie, played by Diane Keaton, watches Allen grow more irritated until he tells the aca-windbag that he misunderstands McLuhan. The academic retorts that he is a New York University professor, and implies that he knows McLuhan better than Allen does. Allen says that he happens to have McLuhan nearby, and fetches McLuhan from beside a nearby cigarette machine. McLuhan agrees with Allen, tells the professor that he misconstrues McLuhan's media theories, and laments that the academic ever got a job teaching in a university. Allen triumphantly turns to the camera and wishes that real life was more like this scene.
The scene could have included fellow Canadian media analyst Harold Innis, a generation earlier than McLuhan, berating McLuhan for misconstruing Innis's theories. Italian media analyst Antonio Gramsci, a generation earlier than Innis, could have berated them both. This regression could continue, no doubt; but I instead move forward in time, and wish for Terry Eagleton to humble Nick Mount.
Lancaster and Notre Dame Universities' English Professor Terry Eagleton (b. 1943, Ireland), a renown Marxist scholar, in his 2013 How to Read Literature, argues that scholars must understand plot, character, narrative, interpretation, and literary devices before they can adopt any theoretical stance, Marxist or otherwise. He laments the neglect of textual analytical skills, historical context, reader context, and literary ranking in this era of post-modernist disregard, misunderstanding, and ignorance of literary analytical techniques. In his preface, Eagleton says he remains a Marxist.
University of Toronto English Professor and Walrus Fiction Editor Nick Mount, in "The uses and abuses of literature" (The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2013) argues that the book proves that Eagleton has renounced his Marxism. Perhaps the good professor did not read the preface, although he seems to have misread the book in general.
Woody Allen makes films. I write about books I read. Some of what I wrote about this book follows.
The book's "chapters are Openings, Character, Narrative, Interpretation, and Value, each spiced with rhetorical and whimsical flourishes, but also solid arguments. Openings refutes post-modernism, a wayward path away from literary precision, respect, and context. This easy task continues through subsequent chapters, which add Aristotelian categories, not immune from flaws themselves, given the historical context Eagleton stresses."
"Form matters, dictates narrative, interpretation, and thus authorial intention, itself open to overthrow, given readers' different eras and values. From Sophocles to Johnson, literature detailed the known; but Romanticism lauded the invented, and its legacy continues. Still, literary device, density, diction, and themes common to many, death, life, love, and such, lend literature value. Great Expectations and Carol Shields trump contrived Updike and inelegant Faulkner, for example."
"Hypocrite attacks idealist for not recanting as he did," I conclude, wishing that I could pull Eagleton from behind Pip to berate Mount. "How you ever got a job teaching at the University of Toronto is beyond me," I dream of Eagleton saying. "Eagleton's Marxist analysis of me captures the rigid English class system which buffets me in Great Expectations," I dream of Pip saying. The novel's author, Charles Dickens, would probably side with Eagleton against Mount.
To paraphrase Woody Allen, "Don't you wish life could be like this?"
Instead, I ponder Alexander Pope, and dream of capping a Dunce who poses as an informed critic. We endure Professor Nick Mount-ing the academic heights, and blowing his windy authority toward that trust fund baby The Walrus, an imitation literary magazine. A book of Dickens in one hand, a book of Eagleton in another, Old Nick draws his rusty literary dagger. He juggles sense and nonsense, carving texts to fit his polemical Procrustean bed. The jester entertains students whose privileged backgrounds insulate them from understanding either the human condition or its literary reflections, and somnolent magazine readers who mistake childish contrivance for literary maturity. Stop opening your mouth in newspapers and letting your brains fall out, Nicky. Go back to barking in your fluffy sinecure, St.Nick, and leave the job of literary critic to the big dogs.
The scene could have included fellow Canadian media analyst Harold Innis, a generation earlier than McLuhan, berating McLuhan for misconstruing Innis's theories. Italian media analyst Antonio Gramsci, a generation earlier than Innis, could have berated them both. This regression could continue, no doubt; but I instead move forward in time, and wish for Terry Eagleton to humble Nick Mount.
Lancaster and Notre Dame Universities' English Professor Terry Eagleton (b. 1943, Ireland), a renown Marxist scholar, in his 2013 How to Read Literature, argues that scholars must understand plot, character, narrative, interpretation, and literary devices before they can adopt any theoretical stance, Marxist or otherwise. He laments the neglect of textual analytical skills, historical context, reader context, and literary ranking in this era of post-modernist disregard, misunderstanding, and ignorance of literary analytical techniques. In his preface, Eagleton says he remains a Marxist.
University of Toronto English Professor and Walrus Fiction Editor Nick Mount, in "The uses and abuses of literature" (The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2013) argues that the book proves that Eagleton has renounced his Marxism. Perhaps the good professor did not read the preface, although he seems to have misread the book in general.
Woody Allen makes films. I write about books I read. Some of what I wrote about this book follows.
The book's "chapters are Openings, Character, Narrative, Interpretation, and Value, each spiced with rhetorical and whimsical flourishes, but also solid arguments. Openings refutes post-modernism, a wayward path away from literary precision, respect, and context. This easy task continues through subsequent chapters, which add Aristotelian categories, not immune from flaws themselves, given the historical context Eagleton stresses."
"Form matters, dictates narrative, interpretation, and thus authorial intention, itself open to overthrow, given readers' different eras and values. From Sophocles to Johnson, literature detailed the known; but Romanticism lauded the invented, and its legacy continues. Still, literary device, density, diction, and themes common to many, death, life, love, and such, lend literature value. Great Expectations and Carol Shields trump contrived Updike and inelegant Faulkner, for example."
"Hypocrite attacks idealist for not recanting as he did," I conclude, wishing that I could pull Eagleton from behind Pip to berate Mount. "How you ever got a job teaching at the University of Toronto is beyond me," I dream of Eagleton saying. "Eagleton's Marxist analysis of me captures the rigid English class system which buffets me in Great Expectations," I dream of Pip saying. The novel's author, Charles Dickens, would probably side with Eagleton against Mount.
To paraphrase Woody Allen, "Don't you wish life could be like this?"
Instead, I ponder Alexander Pope, and dream of capping a Dunce who poses as an informed critic. We endure Professor Nick Mount-ing the academic heights, and blowing his windy authority toward that trust fund baby The Walrus, an imitation literary magazine. A book of Dickens in one hand, a book of Eagleton in another, Old Nick draws his rusty literary dagger. He juggles sense and nonsense, carving texts to fit his polemical Procrustean bed. The jester entertains students whose privileged backgrounds insulate them from understanding either the human condition or its literary reflections, and somnolent magazine readers who mistake childish contrivance for literary maturity. Stop opening your mouth in newspapers and letting your brains fall out, Nicky. Go back to barking in your fluffy sinecure, St.Nick, and leave the job of literary critic to the big dogs.
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